While most reviews spend a lot of time comparing the processor and the form factor, I lay emphasis on the software. Both iPhone and android have shown tremendous innovations and each player enjoys pros and cons of its own.

Interface:
Apple has put in a lot of thought into simplicity into the interface. The Cupertino giant has yet another polished interface, which is extremely easy to use. The android interface on the other hand can really make use of some simplification. The widgets and the mini apps are really confusing.

Lets Talk Apps
While the android market has been booming with apps, the quality of the apps are pretty low. Functionality is not the key, while iPhone leads strongly in terms of uniformity and simplicity. It makes a lot of sense for apple to enforce such strong rules for app approval process.

Maps and Navigation
While both the navigation applications use google for its backend data source, the android application is much better and Google has done a tremendous job with the navigation application. While the iphone does have a really good app, the android app is much better.

Sync Sync Sync
Android had a huge edge on this front, until apple released iCloud as a part of iOS5. This makes a tremendous difference, since the loyal apple followers now enjoy photos, videos and apps on the ipad too.

Bells and Whistles
Both android and iPhone have its own bells and whistles. Android has been an open platform and applications like swype have made a significant impact on the device. Apple, despite being a closed platform now enjoys an amazing talking assistant in the form of siri. Also, iPhone is a global phone which supports both GSM and CDMA, and a lot of smart phone carriers.

In a nutshell, both operating systems are doing great and you will not be disappointed with either.

Related posts:

1. Google Android Mobile to be Launched – T Mobile HTC Dream
2. Android tmobile g1 Unlocked – Unlocking Video
3. Microsoft Launches iphone Application

midventureslaunch

Great minds don’t give excuses and despite the recession, the startups and the entrepreneurs keep their ideas and products coming. If you are in the hunt for great ideas, or great minds or just gather some inspiration, you have to be at midventureslaunch.

This midwest conference is targeted at bringing a lot of startups and provide them with an opportunity to showcase their product in front of venture capitalists and other leaders in the industry. Much in the same lines as any other startup conference, only early startups with less than three years of experience and also $2 million in funding are entertained. There are three different tracks where you can get the attention. You can either compete with other startups or introduce your app for the first time. This sounds like a very good place for a launch, since there are going to be a lot of venture capitalists and also a lot of press.

Teraom will cover more about the companies that will participate in the conference in the coming weeks.

WHAT : Launch Mid Ventures – Startup Conference
WHEN : 28 September 2010
WHERE : Chicago, IL
TICKETS : $50, $25 early bird, $15 students
WEBSITE : http://midventureslaunch.com/startups/

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1. Proto.in Indian Startup Event – Recession What?
2. Startup Watch: Rapportive for a Better Gmail Inbox
3. Microsoft To Launch New Syncing Service – Skybox Cloud

1. Flag IT [Link]

This simple yet powerful addon allows you to add multiple levels of priorities to your email and flag them as neccesary. This way, it becomes easier to follow up with the emails later.

Flag it

2. Widemail [Link]

As some one who has used Lotus Notes for a long time, I personally liked the flexibility of Lotus notes and the personalization features that the program has. Widemail achieves this to some extent by providing you with a three column email client. It gets time to get used to and I wish there is a setting where I can quickly toggle between two and three columns.

Widemail

3. Attachment Check [Link]

This simple plugin checks for an attachment before you send an email, based on keywords present in your message.

attachment check

4. Mail Acton [Link]

Mail rules are great but sometimes you have to make decisions on the fly. This is when you use the mail acton plugin. This can really save a lot of clicks and keystrokes and eventually save a lot of time for power users. You can assign tasks to keystrokes and automatically map them in your email application.

Do you know a good apple mail plugin? Let us know and we ll give credit.

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3. Startup Watch: Rapportive for a Better Gmail Inbox

This service is currently available as a browser addon for firefox and chrome. A safari addon is very likely to be released soon. While this solution sounds great, monetization of this solution seems tricky. Would you like to see you rapportive ads along with the information widget?

While this is a innovative solution, I wonder how long will it take to replicate this solution. Rahul, CEO of rapportive is way ahead of others and already has $1M in funding for this venture. With gmail being one of the most widely used email services, Rapportive has a good shot at providing a better experience for gmail web users. Notably, xobni is already on the same line that provides a similar service for outlook.

Better Gmail Inbox

Being a long time apple mail user, this sparks more ideas of integrating plugins for apple mail. Upon a quick search, it turns out there are a lot of plugins for mac OS X mail plugins.

Teraom Quick Watch:

Company : Rapportive

Funding: $1M

Quick Pitch : Adds information about email sender in your gmail inbox.

Related posts:

1. Startup Watch : BillFloat Helps you Pay your Bills
2. Startup Conference – Midwest Launch
3. Proto.in Indian Startup Event – Recession What?

Billfloat is backed by seed funding from paypal has also raised $4.5M series A funding. It is interesting to note that paypal also already a similar service billmelater. Billfloat is also said to be in talks with other financial services including debit cards.

Billfloat has a large database of services in the United States, ranging from phone services, internet, cable, insurance and other services which involve a monthly recurring payment. You can pick up a service, schedule your bill and request billfloat to pay your bill. You then have 30 days to settle your micro loan back to Billfloat. This loan does not come free and comes with a price tag of $4.99 or more depending on the amount.

billfloat

Billfloat seems to have done the homework with their analysis of United States users, and their stats show that a lot of them borrow money to cover their monthly bills. Waking up from the recession, a perfect opportunity and the right time to launch the product.

Trivia:
1. The system seems to be still in beta and less intuitive, while they are still shaping up the system.
2. I like the Logo a lot!
3. Also, they are hiring.

Teraom Quick Watch:

Company : BillFLoat

Funding : $4.5 Million Series A funding

Quick Pitch : Billfloat pays your utilities bills, you return billfloat 30 days later.

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1. Startup Watch: Rapportive for a Better Gmail Inbox
2. Startup Conference – Midwest Launch
3. Proto.in Indian Startup Event – Recession What?

Creating a website:
Devhub offers a cutting edge free website builder, and it is one of the best software available today to build a website for vast majority of people. Adding modules like pictures, videos, bookmarks, search boxes, affiliate products etc. is a matter of seconds with this drag and drop editor. Rearranging stuff, changing the size of the columns, adding pages is way easier than it used to be with other services.

Free web hosting Plus Money:
While you have to pay roughly $100 to get a good server with other software, devhub offers free web hosting for all your domains. You can also purchase domain names with devhub, or get free web hosting for your existing domains with devhub. Devhub also offers you unlimited subdomains and you can easily create amazon store for free in a matter of seconds with devhub.

Gamification:
Devhub has changed the process of building websites forever. Capitalizing on the unique and innovative idea of making websites as a game, the fun factor is up by hundred fold. With huge appreciation and responses from the tech community, the website building game is now a sweet playground for internet marketers, designers and small businesses alike. You can collect experience points, coins, devatars and awards which you can use to buy stuff from the market place.

free website builder

Make Money Online:
Devhub has a ton of modules that you can use on your website from amazon ads, text ads, shopping.com, pop shops, and many others that you can simply plug in with in seconds. This is faster than anything that you have seen before!

It is Cutting Edge and FREE!! Looking for a free squarespace alternative? Devhub will be a great find for you.

FYI, I am currently doing an internship with this cool startup and I am totally loving it! Start creating your websites today. I challenge that you can create a website faster with devhub than in any other platform.

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Google storage

Google has long been waiting to enter the file storage niche after several small stepping stones. Individual users can use google storage for an expanded inbox, storing pictures in picassa and the google account storage pricing was very lucrative for individuals.

Google also stepped on Gdrive project where users could upload documents to google docs. Google was not easy going on the space though while offering just 1GB of free space, while competitors Microsoft allowed 25GB of free space through Skydrive and Adrive offers 50GB space.

Google storage is a new venture by google, announced in the google IO conference and is targeted at the business and the developer market. In straight words, a competitor to Amazon S3. Google storage is currently available only by invite and just like any other google product, carries the beta tag. This offers the power of storing your files on google cloud, and utilizing the advanced machine learning techniques by google. The google blogs claims that the service will be capable of handling trillions of rows at good speeds. This will be a pay per use service with no tier levels as of now.

Pricing
Clearly, google did not do a good job in pricing the google account storage with picassa, and users are very happy with flickr while paying $24.99 an year. Also, google did not do a good job in offering just 1GB while competitors provided way more space. Google storage pricing seems to be more logical and along the same lines of amazon S3. Google storage is priced at 17 cents per GB per month [Amazon s3 is priced at 15 cents a month]. The two giants share the same requests pricing – 1 cent per 1000 POST requests and 1 cent per 10000 GET requests.

Key Features
Google has already promised its developers a key based authentication, a web interface and advanced access controls. The trump card though is the advanced algorithm which promises high speed access to database of trillions of records.

Image credit: http://www.techdigest.tv

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I happened to attend a talk by Lee Rainie [twitter] in the University of Minnesota on “The Rise of the Networked Individual”. Lee Rainie is one of the master minds behind The Pew Internet & American Life Project and he is a self claimed expert on social media and has done a lot of research on this field.

Here are a few highlights from his speech on April 22, 2010 at UMN.

1. The Golden Age of Amateur Experts both a blessing and a curse.

Participating in social media and creating content is cheap and also easy. Hence there are tons of amateur professionals who publish their thoughts, pictures, videos and other content in the internet and hence the noise becomes higher. This makes it difficult for a consumer of content to identify the best content.
Opportunities: intelligent Feed filters to suppress noise and bring out the best content. Eg. techmeme, techlens

2. Blogs vs social media

Rainie highlights that facebook and other social networks have emerged as one of the most used technologies on the internet, with facebook being a major player in social media and people spend more time with FB than with google search. Microblogging has taken to new heights and the number of people using blogs are coming down.
Applications : A team in facebook has created an application which will create a blog with your FB profile and status updates.

3. The strength of weak ties is bigger than the strength of strong ties

Having read a paper on “Predicting Tie Strength With Social Media” by Eric Gilbert and Karrie Karahalios, which highlights the importance of strong ties, this came in as a surprise. The interesting argument was that all strong ties [friends, family, coworkers] were almost at the same level and had the same contacts as you. However the weal ties played an important role in a job search, because they have a different network. Also, Rainie pointed out that the digital friends are either 0 or 1 [friend or not a friend], where as in real world, there are priorities and ranks.
Applications: Create ranking algorithms in friend circles in social media

4. Dashboard

Integrating social media is the call of the day and there is a lot of potential in integration of social networking sites in to a single portal. This also explains the cost of switching to a new network.
Opportunities : With rich APIs, creating a new portal sounds very plausible.

5. Location Aware Systems

Forusquare was one of the most successful companies in 2009 and yahoo, Microsoft [and facebook ?] are all eyes on it with a billion dollar evaluation. Location aware systems have successfully emerged in bringing a positive mindset with recommendations and networking over weighing the privacy concerns.
Opportunities: Replicate foursquare and make it better!

6. Privacy Concerns :

Americans are extremely concerned with privacy but the technology of social media and location aware systems clearly over-weigh the cons. Rainie highlights that the number of users who leave their data on the cloud is on a exponential high and people are less concerned with privacy these days.

Twitter stream of the speech : #rainie [April 22, 2010]

Related posts:

1. Brightkite – a location based social network

Cloud works on the Past

EyeOS Cloud Operating System

While cloud operating systems seems like an idea of the future, google was not the first to bring into reality. Eyeos was the first operating system and they have been working on the cloud for well over three years. The operating system is very simple to install [requires only php5 and apache] and you can use all basic applications like notepad, office docs, games, explorer and a few others. Eyeos is open source software and is free to use. Other notable projects include icloud and GOS.

Google Chrome OS Project

When google launched its own cloud based operating system, more light was shed on the idea of cloud operating system and now there is more competition. Software giants Big blue is all set into the game and is said to be working on cloud based operating system project. IBM has also shown expertise in cloud based applications with LotusLive Cloud based suite and also spiced it up with inotes, which has raised some interesting insights too.

IBM teams up with EyeOS

IBM Teams up with EyeOs

Last week, IBM joined hands with EyeOs and announced plans of incorporating eyeOs in all Z machines. System Z machines are primarily used by large enterprises and this stands as a big market for the cloud based operating system. This eventually places EyeOs in a successful state and promises a lot of potential market and also revenue though IBM.

Will you use an operating system out of a browser? Does it offer full power? How can cloud applications become better?

Trivia: All 25 of the 25 leading banks in the world use IBM Mainframes for some kind of processing.

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1. Google Phone Nexus one to Fight iphone and Droid
2. Google Storage
3. Google Quick Search Box – Reinventing The Wheel??

The sony vaio T notebook also includes a fingerprint scanner, Digital Tuner, Bluray and 802.11N wifi [Full specs here]. The model is currently available only in Japan and is approximately priced at $1400. Until, you folks can settle for netbooks at amazon.

Battery life:
Standard battery life: 6.5 to 11 hours battery Life
Capacity Battery Pack : 10 hours to 17 hours battery Life

With windows 7 reportedly doing pretty well, this windows 7 notebook could appeal extremely well in the eyes of travelers.

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