Screenshot from iTunes

Ping A social network for music.

Apple has always been well equipped to take on music centered social networks like Last.fm, Like.fm and has finally entered the charts with Ping in sync with iTunes 10. As always the inherent simplicity of Apple services isn’t lost here in a complex web of functionality. Ping is also available on the iPhone and iPod touch with iTunes 10 for the eternally mobile.

Ping Fu!

Nothing so complex that it entails mastering a new technological or social skill even. Basically you follow people (friends, family, strangers and of course the artists themselves) thus establishing your own network. Once you have that pat, you are privy to a world of updates, comments, custom song and album charts, concert listings and more musical melody online.

Artists

Ping allows you to follow your favorite artists thus becoming part of their circle. You can then find out what music that artist likes and start following his/her recommendations to broaden your listening horizons. You are privy to artist photos, status updates and are free to add comments and join the conversation. Since Ping is built into the iTunes app on iPhone and iPod touch, you can see the artist’s updates from everywhere.

Friends

See what kind of music your friends & their friends are listening to. Then follow them to find out what music other fans are listening to lately. Ping alerts you when artists are playing near you and even as to who else will be in the audience. Of course you can choose to buy tickets from Live Nation. Check out who your friends are following and who’s following them back.

Updates

The joy and sharing of social networks is as rampant as ever. Png lets you see what your friends are listening to, who they’re talking about, and what your favorite artists are up to — all on one page. Search for like-minded fans and build or broaden your network. Listen to 30-second previews of songs your friends recommend, following which you can choose to download it through the iTunes Store. Top Charts is a function that tells you what the people you follow are listening to. Access Ping from the iTunes app on your iPhone or iPod touch to see recent friend/artist activity on the go.

Just press Play

With 160 million iTunes users in 23 countries, Steve Jobs, says “With Ping you can follow your favorite artists and friends and join a worldwide conversation with music’s most passionate fans.” With a catalog of over 14 million songs, 65,000 TV episodes and 10,000 movies including over 3,000 in HD video, iTunes 10 offers Movie Rentals, integrated podcasting support, the ability to turn previously purchased tracks into complete albums at a reduced price, and seamless integration with iPod, iPad and iPhone.

Everyone knows about the humble (and not so ethical) beginnings of Facebook. From a poor man’s version of Hot or Not for Harvard students to the current-day Facebook, they grew to more than 500 million active users. The growth sure is, exponential; and the reach is, unparalleled. Coupled with over 900 million objects (pages, groups, events and community pages) that the users interact with and more than 30 billion pieces of content — web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc., shared each month; Facebook is a nightmare (pun intended), both in terms of the storage and the delivery of this huge data content to members across the globe interconnected — to each other in unimaginable ways.

Contrary to what most of the populace knows, Facebook has been developed from the ground up, using Open Source software. Developers building Platform scale with their own applications are using many of the same infrastructure technologies that power Facebook. The reliance of Facebook on open source software has gone beyond the LAMP stack + Memcached.

Let’s have a look at the Open Source tools which result in Facebook’s success & popularity.

Scribe: Scribe was developed at Facebook and released as open source to handle the 25 terabytes of data it logs every day. It is designed to be scalable, extensible without client-side modification, and robust to failure of the network or any specific machine. The installation at Facebook runs on thousands of machines and reliably delivers tens of billions of messages a day.

HIVE: Hive is a data warehouse infrastructure built on top of Hadoop. It provides tools to enable easy data ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), a mechanism to put structures on the data, and the capability to querying and analysis of large data sets stored in Hadoop files. Hive defines a simple SQL like query language, called QL, that enables users familiar with SQL to query the data. It is best used for batch jobs over large sets of immutable data (like web logs). What Hive values most are scalability, extensibility, fault-tolerance and loose-coupling with its input formats.

HipHop: HipHop for PHP is a source code transformer for PHP script code. HipHop programmatically transforms PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it to machine code. HipHop was created by Facebook, under the lead of Haiping Zhao, to save resources on their servers.

Cassandra: Cassandra was developed by Facebook to power their Inbox Search feature. It is an Apache Software Foundation top-level project now, designed to handle very large amounts of data spread out across many commodity servers while providing a highly available service with no single point of failure. Digg and Twitter are also supported by Cassandra.

Thrift: Thrift is a framework developed for “scalable cross-language services development” to work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, C#, Java, Perl, Python, PHP, Erlang and Ruby. Originally developed at Facebook, it is now an open source project in the Apache Software Foundation Incubator.

As Facebook grows, it continually faces scalability challenges that no one has solved, and it is trying to engineer its way through them. Already, Facebook is the second most-trafficked PHP site in the world (Yahoo is ‘currently’ #1), and one of the largest MySQL installations anywhere, running thousands of databases. In terms of total photo page views, it exceeds the entire next largest photo sites combined.

As of now, let’s just say, Hail Facebook!

Introduction

A location-based service (LBS) is primarily an information service that has off late crossed over rather successfully into the entertainment arena. Accessible with mobile devices on standard networks they utilize the geographical position of the mobile device. LBS services can be used in a variety of contexts — health, education, career, social life, etc. Such services identify the location of a person or object, such as discovering the nearest ATM machine or the whereabouts of a dear friend.

In the corporate sector, LBS services include parcel tracking and vehicle tracking services and coordinating employee movements on field. Mobile commerce adds an exciting new facet when discount coupons or advertising is directed at customers based on their current location. They include personalized weather services and even location-based games. Location Based Services truly epitomize the telecommunication convergence of our times. In a bid to create differentiation and increase profits, companies are offering highly personalized services and the most powerful ways to personalize such services is based on location.

LBS makes possible search and discovery of persons, places, and things within an identifiable space defined by distinct parameters that include social networks, individuals, cities, neighborhoods, landmarks, and actions that are relevant to the searcher’s past, current, and future location.

Positioning Technology

GPS: One of the most obvious technologies behind LBS is the Global Positioning System (GPS). GPS is based on the concept of triangulation, a basic geometric principle that allows finding one location if one knows its distance from other, already known locations.

GSM localization: The location of a mobile device is found in relation to its cell site or the nearest cellular tower. These technologies are network based positioning and typically rely on various means of triangulation of the signal from cell sites serving a mobile phone.

Near LBS (NLBS): Local range technologies such as Bluetooth, WLAN, infrared and/or RFID are used to match devices to nearby services, thus allowing a person to access information based on their surroundings; especially suitable for using inside closed premises, restricted/regional areas.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS): This system provides base map data such as man made structures (streets, buildings) and terrain (mountains, rivers) and is used to manage point-of-interest data such as location of gas stations, restaurants, nightclubs, etc. Information about the radio frequency characteristics of the mobile network allows the system to determine the serving cell site of the user.

Location Management Function: This function processes positioning and GIS data on behalf of LBS applications,  acts as a gateway between positioning equipment and LBS infrastructure.

Services

Location based information: For example, a mobile phone search for a restaurant would interact with other location technology components to determine the user’s location and provide a list of restaurants within a certain proximity to the mobile user.

Location based billing: Preferential billing is provided by this type of application. Users can establish personal zones such as a home zone or work zone and enjoy flat-rate calling while in the home area and special rates while in other defined zones.

Emergency services: Location based emergency services pinpoint your location and relays it to the authorities. Many telecom services provide a certain degree of accuracy in pinpointing the location of mobile users who dial  Emergency Police or Fire hotlines.

Tracking: LBS applications such as fleet applications typically track vehicles for purposes of the owning company knowing the whereabouts of the vehicle and/or operator thus also enabling mobile commerce. Individual  mobile users could be tracked and provided information that he/she has predetermined as a desire, such as notification of a sale on shoes at a store close to the user’s current proximity.

Social Networking & Gaming: Such applications work off of the concept of “checking in” to locations as you visit them, inviting friends, leaving tips glued to GPS coordinates and competing for digital rewards in the form of badges, or titles like “mayor” (for the user who checks in the most at a venue) or collect digital goodies, akin to virtual geocaching. Even Facebook has a new feature, called Places, that allows users to share their locations with friends – and allows their friends to be updated in real-time.

Summary

Location Based Services are a strategic asset that leverages information, enabling users to experience value-added services and the mobile network operator to offer differentiation and incremental profitability. The popularity of social networks has people embracing apps like Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and now Facebook Places that bring together gaming and social networking to a highly valuable information service.

There are numerous reports doing rounds predicting tremendous growth of the Indian Gaming Industry. The forecasts are out and the claim is that the industry would grow at a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 32% by the year 2014 recording an amount of Rs. 3100 crore. I might as well bet all my money on this forecast, since most current facts and details entice me to do so.

In India, aspects such as young population, increasing disposable incomes, larger wireless user base and rise in the number of game developers and publishers have over a period of time contributed to the tremendous growth of the Indian Gaming Industry. The magnitude of the Indian gaming industry was evaluated at around Rs. 790 crore in the year 2009 as against Rs. 650 crore in the year 2008, representing a development of 22% from 2008 to 2009.

Owing to the above mentioned factors and also with the anticipation of the industry to deliver innovative and entertaining games the growth level is speculated to exceed 30% and make money that is equivalent to Rs. 3.9 billion by 2014.

Key Drivers of the gaming industry’s progress

Console Gaming: Firms that follow the console gaming business models are gradually shifting from a product based to a more services based business model facilitating gamers to not just play but also watch movies, upload photos and so on. With this, the CAGR of console gaming in the country is expected to increase from Rs. 5.8 billion in 2009 to Rs. 11.6 billion by 2014.

Mobile phone gaming: With the likeliness of 3G services to hit the Indian telecom industry soon, mobile phone gamers can enjoy efficient high speed data networks, thus relishing uninterrupted online gaming activities.

Local needs under check: Many Indian gaming companies have undergone mergers with western gaming firms and hence have seen advancement technologically. Gaming companies still come up with content that is more local such as Hanuman and Kabaddi that are quite popular among Indians.

Enhanced Online Gaming: The progress of the online gaming industry through social networking sites has surely augmented the Indian gaming industry. Also, gaming shops like Zynga’s existence online and their reach to the social networking audiences has definitely contributed to the worldwide growth of the gaming industry. The growth evidently reflects in the statistics as the year 2009 saw over 85 million PC literate online gamers as against 65 million PC users in 2008 indicating steady growth of the online gaming industry.

Even after considering the above points, there still is a part of me that is pessimistic about the speculation of the Indian gaming industry to attain 32% growth by 2014. Limited knowledge and awareness of the gaming products, lack of gaming infrastructure and technology and certain conflicts between gaming publishers and telecom service providers with regard to the revenue sharing agreement are a few reasons that could bog down the CAGR of the Indian gaming industry. However, growth for the industry is inevitable.

Photo by Anderson Silva

Redhat Provider of Linux and open source technology.

Though there seemed to be quite a few rumors of a possible buyout plan being staged by SAP to takeover RedHat. Various industry executives believe otherwise; stating that the likelihood of such an acquisition to take place are quite slim.

There is not just one industry that SAP offers its services to, rather there exists an assortment of industries that encompass the clientele of SAP. In that, SAP does not believe in fabricating generic solutions to all industries, but develops industry specific solutions thereby solving problems in an effective and efficient manner. Keeping this into consideration, it doesn’t make much of business nous for SAP to get hold of Red Hat — a company that is into virtualization, middleware and Linux OS technologies.

It would rather build on the enterprise mobility strategy which apparently SAP is entirely engaged into through its recent acquisition of Sybase. And this comes across as a superior business idea. It is also essential to mention the fact that most or all of SAP’s client companies each belong to distinct IT fields or sectors and any intention of buying Red Hat which is primarily into open source technology and linux development would not bode well for the working of the organization.

Experts in the industry have also hinted that SAP does not acquire systems-level infrastructure vendors. Besides this, buying Red Hat would communicate mixed messages to its consumers creating perplexity on the prospects of a few technologies specifically SAP’s NetWeaver middleware platform; which represents SAP’s version of open source technologies. Previously SAP has been receptive to large deals like its recent takeover of BI (business intelligence) vendor Business Objects that costed $6.8 billion and also the Sybase deal that was worth $6 billion.

But buying RedHat, which has apparently earned $748 million in revenue for its fiscal 2010 requires SAP to spend a considerably large amount that could even be larger than its previous two behemoth deals. Common sense would prevail if an organization does not spend so much and pile up a stack that has already been mastered by SAP. Nevertheless it should bank on new trends and hence capitalize on fresh markets so as to sustain its endeavor of serving a wide array of industries.

Having said that, considering that it is a pretty crazy time in the technology industry & more so in the domain of acquisitions, wherein firms are bent upon the enlargement of their technological footprint & also diversification of risk; it is not that bad an idea for SAP to buy Red Hat. Also, since the time SAP has initiated open source technology solutions it has acquired quite a few relevant open source companies. Of all these the one that was amongst the top ranked and that was not acquired, was Red Hat. So buying it could prove fruitful.

Whether SAP decides to buy Red Hat or not, and if it does, whether the acquisition works or not; SAP can always do what it has always done and still succeed and that is to continue developing path breaking technological solutions.

There are lots of solutions these days to make it easy for you to open an online shopping site. Building an online store for your business can never be this easy. Wazala is another of such solution, offering a simple software solution of opening up online stores to any self employed populace that claim existence in the internet arena in the form of a website or a blog. It is designed to primarily help anyone selling her goods or services online, who in turn would allow their consumers to shop online.

A passionate photographer who wants to sell some of her best pictures; a craftsman wanting to sell his crafts, a blogger who wants to sell her writings, etc. can now depend on Wazala and benefit from selling their products and services online and earn revenues. Wazala is a website overlay application that functions as an e-commerce Shopping Cart Software assisting people in making purchases online.

The creation of an online store through this new e-commerce solution and adding the same on to your website or blog would take 15 minutes; the same quantum of time that Andy Warhol believed every individual on planet Earth would take to become famous. You would not want to trust Andy, but you could sure believe the fact that Wazala facilitates your website or blog to encompass an online store of its own in 15 minutes. There is not the requirement of the user to be an intellect in coding or have immense knowledge about internet to layout the Wazala Shopping Cart Software onto her website. You do not need the services of a web designer or a finance company to fund your online shopping store.

A straightforward copy, paste, point and click operation would integrate the store widget onto the user’s website with a small red button at the right hand top corner side of the site layout. Once a customer logs into your website and clicks on the red button, there would open up a separate window which overlays your website (right on top of your content). With this, there is absolutely no need for you to spend money on an extra webpage and also, the design of Wazala is subtle and graceful that does not affect the design element of the website.

Apart from this Wazala allows consumer stickiness as they have the facility of dumping the most liked products or services into “favorites” whereby customers can invest time in making shopping decisions and come back later once they have made a final choice. Wazala also ties online entrepreneurs up with PayPal, Google Checkout and Authorize.net the most trustworthy online services for smooth receipt of payments from end-consumers.

In addition to this, Wazala enables its business users to turn into Multi-National Companies owing to the online store that would be available in 15 languages and 24 currencies, hence globalizing their operations across countries.

Wazala could face inconvenience in the form of competition from Shopify, Big Cartel, Magneto, etc. that also offer e-commerce software solutions to businesses. In every industry there is bound to exist some sort of competition, and to reach to the top level and sustain the same would take a lot of maturity and being abreast of the latest technological novelties.

Having said that, I see no reason why Wazala should not reach the top. Best wishes to Wazala.

Illustration from Safety Act Consultants

Internet Security Are user’s privacy at stake?

It was always believed that, only the Security Agencies are willing to access the data flowing through the World Wide Web. This belief has been proved wrong, since now the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) working under the Ministry of Finance are having plans for accessing the Internet Monitoring Systems. Recently in a meeting of the Inter-Ministerial Group, this proposal was put by forward DRI, and a discussion was carried out.

As per the information provided by a top Government official, DRI are willing to have permission to monitor the systems, which are used in bids. They want to have a record of all the deals. The online tracking will also help them to get information of any suspected tax violators.

The Way Ahead

The Ministry of Home Affairs is having multiple strategies, so that they can get access to the various communication networks, all across India. Putting satisfactory monitoring devices is the basic priority before any kind of new services which are been launched by the telecom operators. Already the majority of services in the country are tracked by the security agencies. The main concerns of these monitoring agencies are the upcoming third generation (3G) mobile networks and the high encrypted services, for example, BlackBerry.

The Challenges

The security agencies are dealing with various issues and one of the major one is that they do not have the advanced technology that will help them to crack into any kind of data encryption.

It has been made compulsory to the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DoT) for installing an Internet Monitoring System. Orders for the same are passed by the government. This system will be later used by the various intelligence agencies, as to find out what kind of data is flowing throughout the networks. On the other hand, until now prying of such kind was being carried out only by the appointed agencies. Also, they were managed by the Home Ministry. As said by various industry experts, the request made by the DRI may possibly raise several questions regarding privacy of the user.

The Requisites

An industry expert added that there is a huge requirement of proper law, which will be responsible for governing the Internet monitoring and security. He also said that national security and intelligence is of paramount importance, however few laws should be designed for protecting the privacy of the maximum Internet users who are in no-way related with the anti-social activities.

The model should be built on the lines of developed countries like United States wherein revenue agencies are using similar kind of monitoring systems, so as to look after the various illegal activities, for example money laundering otherwise tax evasion.

The government is definitely taking right steps in looking after the security of the country, however with this they are required to draw a line from where they need to stay away from interfering in the personal lives of the several internet users. Laws to protect their privacy should be properly designed too.

Illustration from PollenEight

PollenEight A venture fund aimed specifically at promoting innovation in the mobile space.

PollenEight, a venture fund aimed specifically at promoting innovation in the mobile space, is being officially launched today the NASSCOM EmergeOut Conclave in New Delhi, India.

If you’re a mobile startup and looking for seed fund, PollenEight is eager to be contacted. Applications are being accepted currently and have an upcoming deadline of October 15, 2010.

PurpleTalk, the parent venture behind PollenEight, are amongst the early players in mobile software development. With PollenEight, they’re on a mission to help young entrepreneurs start off in the mobile space as well as encourage the pace of mobile software innovation, especially among developers in India.

Startups in the Mobile space, can apply for their program (upcoming deadline Oct 15, 2010).

Image from Adobe

Adobe AcrobatView, print, and collaborate on PDF files

If it weren’t for Adobe Acrobat and its myriad computer programs, all us web and technology enthusiasts could have had a tough task in viewing, creating, manipulating and managing files that is usually done using Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format). It is a known fact that Acrobat Reader programs are available online for download at zero cost facilitating users to view files, whilst other Adobe software needed to create and manage files come at a cost.

However, recent news has it that there has been a steep rise in Adobe Vulnerabilities and also that rogue PDFs account for 80% of all exploits. Adobe Reader and Acrobat itself claimed through its recently released security advisory that critical security vulnerabilities have originated in their programs increasing Adobe’s headaches. It is also revealed at the Black Hat Conference that the newly discovered Adobe Reader/ Acrobat Font Parsing Integer Overflow Vulnerability is rated as the second most Critical Vulnerability that existed. Hackers who are able to exploit this vulnerability can effectively enjoy remote code execution of their targeted system.

A short-term and a more temporary solution for this would be updates discharged online by Adobe to its numerous users. A more permanent and updated solution comes from Adobe through unifying with the technology stalwart — Microsoft with the mission of spreading awareness and solution campaigns amongst avid Adobe users about security vulnerabilities. Adobe and Microsoft plan to diminish the rising vulnerability issue by extending the Microsoft Active Protections Program (MAPP) with the inclusion of vulnerability sharing information from Adobe. This program enables companies and users to know more about current and expected vulnerabilities and also resolve their existing vulnerabilities by ascertaining information about security vulnerabilities with security software vendors.

The fact that organizations worldwide depend enormously on Adobe products and services for work related purposes has caught the attention of many hackers hence posing a potential threat to users. In verity Adobe has realized this threat and has received help from Microsoft that has offered a new approach to providing advance security to users. Running a virus scan or updating your system only after an attack has taken place, could really frustrate the user and test their patience. Rather than this, if users are made aware of potential threats that could take place to their Adobe products they would automatically be groomed to eradicate vulnerabilities prior to the happening of the attacks. This is exactly what Microsoft’s MAAP would do.

The effectiveness of this move could not be well up to the mark, since it mostly promises information-sharing with no set software that keeps users permanently away from vulnerabilities. Microsoft’s acknowledgement though, of vulnerabilities and cyber attacks along with its intention to maintain a Green (virus-free) PC ecosystem must be appreciated.

Illustration from Locality Switch (Via: Google Images)

Open Source BIAre you impressed?

I have always had a liking for the quote — “All that glitters is not gold.” Though it is not exactly what I mean to exemplify about Open source Business Intelligence Tools in this article, but would want to put forward certain shortcomings about these offerings. Clearly, Open source BI has been at a tipping point in the recent years and has created news of being the next big thing in the Business Intelligence business.

It’s major plus was enabling users gain freedom to leverage and customize high-quality code as a jumpstart to custom development. But a Forrester report suggests that these open source offerings are not free from drawbacks. This in spite of their abilities to endow business enterprises with tools that offer ways to mine database and spreadsheet centric data, and produce graphical, table-based and other types of analytics regarding business operations.

It is evident that the open-source BI comprises of benefits that are generic and similar to those provided by other open source software segments, that being — low cost, flexible support and integration options. Apart from this, it is also noted that corporates find it difficult to disengage from the open source software tools that they have been using, as they are able to probe into and extend the source code with much more freedom than with any other software tools.

Most of us are aware of the fact that open-source firms offer community editions free of cost, and that premium packages are sold at a price lesser than those sold by traditional proprietary products. It becomes noteworthy that the premium versions sold by open-source organizations lag behind in terms of extra features.

Tools like OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) also fall into the offerings of Open source Business Intelligence firms like Jaspersoft, Pentaho and SpagoBI, but are found to lack in features when compared to commercial products. A common hindrance that both open source and licensed Business Intelligence firms face is the inability to integrate the multiple technologies and software applications that they possess, hence failing to offer a more comprehensive solution to business users.

In addition, most open source software applications are blamed for being unreliable with no existence of support for the applications. While there are many forums available on the internet to help you run and install these softwares, there is no authorized support available. There is also the scare of not enjoying guaranteed updates making your method of analyzing business data old and obsolete with the passing of time. There is also the mention of few more drawbacks but this could just be exaggerating the issue.

We await open source vendors to take note of these deficiencies and offer a more comprehensive integration of the Business Intelligence tools.