Responding to Shubham's Tag ... My 5 Favorite Websites:- Wikipedia LinkedIn SlideShare bloozle IMdb Two more sites which I don't use that often (because they are services and used only when needed), but I like a lot are erail.in , IRCTC . Favorite Browser:- Firefox 3.0 :-) Google Tools and Services I use (apart from Search):- GMail and Gmail on Mobile Blogger Docs and Spreadsheets Bookmarks & Web History Calendar Google Groups Picassa Maps Alert Adsense

You might be surprised to see the title after the post I made last night. But I am really impressed the way Zapak has reacted to my post. Read on to know more ... When I made the post last night, India was still in deep slumber; and when India woke up - I was in deep slumber. But while I was asleep, the Zapak team woke up to my blog post - they thereafter tracked me through various Social networks and by the time I woke up, I had a couple requests from their team to connect to me. [The earliest one was as early as 7.57 AM India time] I was surprised (and impressed) about the speed with which they contacted me - so I sent out my contact details, and Lo! Within less than an hour I had them calling me explaining that the mail I received was because of some kind of spurious network activity and was a "security issue" which they were dealing with. They requested me to remove the image which I had put up on my blog, because it revealed some internal statistics they were tracking. W

Update : If you are reading this - please also read my follow up post Zapak - a dynamic and proactive Web2.0 company? which is an account of the events which happened after I made this post. Someone at Zapak.com (also ZapakMail) seems to have conjured up the "good idea" of sending out Birthday emails to its members. But as they say - the implementation and not the idea is what creates success - apart from the fact that the email looks like a 1990 word document [and that too hardly like a greeting or newsletter of 1990 but rather looking like some office document] - the email commits the one of the worst faux passes of the internet world. [The Image has been removed] The email [below the part shown above] contains a list of all email ID's who have registered their birthdates for the day! Not only is everyone's email ID being revealed to everyone else, their birthdates are also revealed. For so many people who keep variations of their birthdates as their passwords -

Yesterday I got an email from acquaitance with a request to help someone related to him with a job. His email said that the said relation of his "working in [an] IT firm was laid off due to recession". I am suprised that IT'Cos have started laying off people citing reasons of "recession" because the recession is still to come. I suspect this is the case of the company trying to lay-off people from unprofitable projects (which is a routine process in IT'Cos) under the pretext of recession. However, there is no denying that effects have started showing already on the IT industry of a eminent slowdown. This overall points to a direction that companies which have been traditionally relying on a pure "Services model" (read: Maintenance services) will increasingly find it tough to survive. The age has arrived for product based companies to take a lead. SaaS companies will be also able to make it big now owing to the suitability of their Business Model f

Some time back I had written on how so many banks use IT Applications as electronic record keeping books. Today, I read an article by Paul Glen* titled Project Managers: Stop "gathering" IT requirements . It seems to be pointing to the same problem but some another angle. What Paul says is probably the root cause of - what I had mentioned - why IT fails to deliver competitive advantage to users; I quote: Requirements don't exist out in the ether just waiting to be discovered. They aren't out there whole and finished. Clients and users aren't playing an expensive game of hide-and-seek with us. Usually, the clients' pockets are empty. Most of the time, they don't exactly know what they require. And even if they do, it's in the form of incomplete and inconsistent ideas that can be only partially articulated. Projects rarely start out with clear objectives or requirements; they begin in confusion and ambiguity. While Paul blames the IT organization for th

Om Malik either does not know about "microformats" especially hCard (which is unlikely) or has willingly chosen to ignore it in his article (see excerpt at the end). The solution to directory problem is not to have a single provider like google or Plaxo collate all information about a person, but to allow any service to syndicate the same standard contact information. The solution is the standard microformat for storing your contact details from email, to phone number/ postal address to social network profile info. Once all existing platforms which store profile info - blogs, email services, eGroups, specialized networks (forums/ batchmates.com etc.) - start using the same format, it will be possible for any service to access hCard info from any other service (provided privacy is taken care of by allowing users the right to share/ not share). Also, this will make it possible for you to store your hCard info at only on of the websites you use (say your personal blog or social

RSS, Microformats, OpenID, Tagging - all these formats, protocols and practices are extending the underlying philosophies of the OSI Model to provide continuity across multi-vendor environments. In fact, an initiative to formalize this 'extention' is already on at dataportability.org . As they say on their website: The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together. [Their] mission [is] to put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community. Notably, all the major players from Google/Yahoo/MySpace to Microsoft/Verisign are already a part of this initiative. However, this initiative, just like the OSI Model - has more to do with the developer/vendor community and little to do with common users. And this is where DataPortability needs to differ from the OSI Model.

Continuing from my previous post, clearly the web of software services to inter-operate with each other need an extension of the OSI Model to services level. There are many service which are working in this direction viz. RSS: Really Simple Syndication RSS is a format used to publish updates of your website content. Typically RSS is used by news websites or blogs - where content is dynamic and requires users to keep checking the site for updates. RSS updates could be just pointers to changes (or summary of changes) or it could contain the full feed ( i.e. all the new content). An RSS is typically read using a feed reader - a program similar to an email client which keeps checking for updates. While the primary function of an RSS feed is to provide information updates - it also helps in separating the 'presentation' from the underlying 'content' - just as the OSI Model separates presentation from data. With RSS in place, you need not read a blog or news only in the fo

Way back in 1977 when a working group on Distributed Systems at ANSI was asked to work on OSI Model ( Open Systems Interconnection Basic Reference Model ) - they had little idea that the concept of distributed systems would one day grow to create the mother of all 'distributed systems' - the Internet. Technically the internet is a massive network of hardware - but conceptually, its a platform (or a cloud if you prefer) upon which Software Services can run seamlessly making it transparent to the users, where the software is running, where the data comes from, which hardware is serving server cycles ... and so on. All this abstraction is possible today only because of the well designed OSI Model which separates the "Presentation" from data and network from the underlying hardware. The OSI model has also helped to come up with protocols like TCP which have made compatibility a non-issue when it comes to connecting computers across the world (which run on different hardw

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As a part of my day job with KPMG, I work with many financial institutions consulting then on their Technology aspects. Indian Financial institutions – especially private banks and funds – aim to leverage Information technology to improve their operations and financial control alike. The top managements of almost all reputed institutions are quite bullish on using technology in all spheres of their work – however when one comes in close contact with the way technology is leveraged on ground, one starts questioning the efficacy of mere top management commitment. What I have observed is that for most line managers , Information Technology is simply about mapping the existing processes on the IT systems, resulting into only the record keeping process getting digitized. The process continues to operate with the same mechanics as before and in effect the process re-engineering opportunities, that an IT implementation offers, are lost. As the Harvard professor on enterprise 2.0, Andrew McAfe

Today as Wikipedia celebrates its 7th Birthday , it can definitely claim to have come of age. Indeed, from corporate to students, Wikipedia is the gateway to knowledge. Wikipedia's value is considered to be of leading students to citable sources, and though it is not considered an appropriate source for citation itself [ 1 ] - its definitely one of the places millions go to in order to start their research . However, apart from contributing to actual knowledge base - Wikipedia's more important contribution has been in changing (corporate) mindsets towards the new tools information technology offers. Thanks to the success of Wikipedia - so many corporate have started their own Wikis , blogs etc for knowledge management within their firms. Ironically, adoption of new technologies has created new dilemmas for the CIO. Earlier, while knowledge was never recorded, it is now being recorded; but, it is spread between uploaded documents, wikis and blogs. And I am wondering what wil

Hemant tells me that Satyam has a whole blogosphere inside the corporate intranet - which Satyam intends to use as a Knowledge management tool - I think it does the same things as what Prof. McAfee describes as "above the flow wikis" - knowledge management outside the day to day flow of work. Hemant also tells me hat some blogs are immensely popular and act as incentives for others also to blog about their work - indeed Satyam has found some way to overcome " the challenge of getting people to use above-the-flow wikis". Read on - the quote below is interesting ... Source: Why Not Widen the Flow? by Andrew McAfee One of Michael's first posts was about the distinction between using wikis and other social software 'in the flow' of work versus 'above the flow.' As he explains : In-the-Flow wikis enable people do their day-to-day work in the wiki itself. These wikis are typically replacing email, virtual team rooms, and project management syst

Marshal Kirkpack Says ... Google and Facebook, two companies that hold more user data and do more with it than almost any other consumer service on the market Source : Google and Facebook Join DataPortability.org from Read/WriteWeb Isn't he being too tech-world-centric and ignoring the "old economy" completely? I think companies who "hold more user data" and "do more with it" than others surely would be Banks and other financial institutions (I am counting out governments as they are not "consumer services") than Google or Facebook for 2 reasons: How many people have accounts with these two companies as compared to how many have accounts with Banks? How much important is data like say "my search history" or "my friend list" as compared to "my credit history" ?? Need I say more .... ? While data portability is an important technology issue (new microformats, APML etc) which needs to be discussed - governments, co

I was musing over how popular are India-specific blogging services on Alexa - and here is what I found. The graph below plots RediffBlogs against BlogStreet and BlogPulse. Click on the images to see enlarged versions I have added BlogSteet [in Blue ]and BlogPulse [in Red ] only for comparison because they are pretty unknown services at least in India [BlogStreet is a coranking site cum blog directory (of Indian blogs) while BlogPulse is a blog metrics tracker (not focussed to Indian blogosphere though)] Observe that the traffic of RediffBlogs[in Green ] - is quite comparable to these 'unknown' services. Now I added RediffBlogs competitor O3 [in Cyan ] from Indiatimes.com to the comparison ... Just observe how the scale of the graph changes - BlogStreet, BlogPulse and RediffBlogs , almost vanish when traffic metrics from Indiatimes are plotted. Clearly O3 is way ahead of rediffBlogs - so much so that - if I were to decide the fate of RediffBlogs, I would shut it down! Link to a

Australian startup Fluc is an innovative new mobile advertising network [where] Users provide Fluc with a profile of their tastes and interests when they sign up for the service, and Fluc uses that information as well as geopositioning data to deliver extremely well targeted ads. I.e., if the GAP knows you're near a mall where they have an anchor store, and they know from your Fluc account that you fit their consumer profile, then they might pay to send you an ad even if your motives for receiving it may be hazy. Instead of going through this complex and extremely expensive 'geopositioning' rechnology - Indian Malls are providing the same service through Bluetooth . Pros - cheap, definitely targeted and users 'opt-in' by enabling their bluetooth connection Cons - Every Mall must set this up independently, If the user  does not make his bluetooth  visible to the mall, the promotion cannot be done (but this service is an opt-in anyway) I suppose I will give full

The first results of the Human Genome project (HGP) have started coming in. Hindustan Times reported in a front page article today that Humans have evolved fastest in the past 5000 years since we separated from our 'parent' chimpanzees - and the rate of evolution is seeding up, also thanks to " the surge in global population ..... since more mutations occur now". The research in specific is not of so much consequence, as is the fact that the genome project has started its data analysis stage and some results have started emerging. Why this is exciting is because the HGP holds the key to several breakthroughs in the field of biomedicine - and probably a permanent cure for several unconquerable diseases like cancer and AIDS. Scientists also predict that when the study of the Human Genome is close to completion - it will lead to development of 'customized medicine" - wherein each person can be given medicines depending upon what would best suit his/ her ana

http://noserub.com NoseRub is a protocol . Applications with the NoseRub protocol keep information about profile data for each of the contacts. These profiles get synchronised between the applications/social networks ... and can be used by any other NoseRub service . NoseRub uses already available standards like OpenID , RSS and FOAF to provide the goal of having a truely decentralised social network. How do I own my data? Decentralised means, that people may be able to store their social network on their own server and those servers to interact and synchronize automatically. One company doesn't own your data and social network anymore, you own and control it . We understand NoseRub not only as an application, like what is running on Identoo.com and which everyone can download and install on their own servers. We want even more freedom for the people who want to use NoseRub. More: http://noserub.com/q

[Q]... do you have a sense of how you would place it all historically? [Tim Berners Lee]I'll answer that one in a thousand years' time, if that's okay. [LAUGHTER] I think trying to write the history, at the time I think it's very difficult. we didn't know whether we were going to be looking at history or not, because when you look at a curve like that, an exponential curve going up can often just tilt over and crash back down again. And there were a lot of other projects we've all had which have done that. How very true - Tim Berners Lee put it quite aptly that an exponential curve could as well crash and end up looking like a 'blip' on the scale of centuries in history. Many of us Millenials remember the craze that VCR's were in the 90's - some of today's most hyped innovations like the i-Pod or iPhone could as well end up similarly. It is too early to place any new technology or trend as a game changer - which is a mistake that many a te

Josh Catone wrote on RWW a few days ago in favour of Facebook having groupware tools built in ... The reason I gave in Monday's piece was convenience. Right now, I have Basecamp projects open with four different groups, meaning I have to remember passwords to four different Basecamps. That is in addition to the hundreds of sites I already have to remember passwords for for other things I do online. The more you can get the things you do under a single umbrella, the less work you have to do get to work. I think he is asking for apples from an orange tree ;-). Isn't he asking for a single sign on to all his online tools, rather than ask for making the social network (facebook / orkut etc) as his virtual operating system for the web? Well Josh - there are things like the OpenID or Windows Live ID to embrace rather than ask for everything to be embedded into facebook or orkut. Just because teenagers use social networks whole day, we shouldn't misplace our faith in them!!