Web Apps going Offline in 2007 -ReadWrite Web

Firefox 3 will offer support for running web applications offline. Though it’s not yet clear on which level this might happen, this is major news for SaaS providers (Software as a Service). Of course, Firefox isn’t alone in trying to move web apps offline - Adobe’s Apollo framework promotes offline-services on top of their successful Flash platform.

Besides Adobe, several open source projects are working on solutions for the offline-dilemma: the Dojo Offline Project and POW (Plain Old Webserver) both implement a proxy http-server for running local copies of web-applications. While Dojo Offline isn’t available yet, POW - a firefox plugin (which means basically a web-server implemented in Javascript!) - is ready for download.

Related: How Firefox 3 will deliver support for offline applications...

This is significant because you'll be able to use your web apps - like Gmail, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, etc - in the browser even when offline. I deliberately mentioned all Google web apps there, because of course this plays right into Google's hands.

Although Mozilla is an open source organization, some of its top workers are employed by Google. So it's a very cozy relationship. We've discussed before how Firefox 3 as information broker suits Google very nicely, because the Mountain View company has a number of best of breed web apps - and if it's not building them, it's acquiring them (YouTube, JotSpot, Writely, etc).

Long Time... No Post!

I hardly updated my blog after I joined NID... which is from past 1 and half years! Hope I will get back to blogging soon... btw, u can check NID team blog at http://nidg.blogspot.com

Search Companies Team Up Against Click Fraud -Slashdot

The top three search companies, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, have teamed up to create an alliance to combat click fraud. The fact that these three bitter rivals can team up shows just how serious the industry has become about preserving the current online advertising boom that is currently underway.

Click fraud has attracted an increasing amount of attention amid class-action lawsuits and industry studies asserting advertisers have been collectively overcharged by more than $1 billion for bogus sales leads during the past four years. Google and Yahoo contend that those estimates are gross exaggerations generated by opportunistic lawyers and online advertising consultants hoping to cash in on the anxieties triggered by their calculations.

Link to specific points inside a Video and Audio file -Amit Agarwal

Audio Markers make it possible for users to link to a specific point in the mp3 file so it begins to play only from that particular location, skipping all the content before that time.

Same can be done with video files. You can bookmark position(start marker) in google video so if you want the user to watch only a part of the video clip, starting from say 2min 32sec in a 10min video.

Here's an illustration.

The original URL of a particular video on google video is
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3383042311441257769

We want it to resume playing at 9minutes 32 seconds, so we will append 9m32sec to the above URL
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3383042311441257769#9m32s

I ain't sure whether google video has stop marker facility. On second thoughts, stop marker aint really required.

Hide your email address on websites from spam -Amit Agarwal

E-mail addresses in your blog or webpage are no secret to spam robots. Here's a guide that should help you protect your email addresses from these spam spiders. Techniques mentioned use text manipulation, Masking, HTML, Flash, CSS, Javascript, etc to hide email.

Sooner or later you will have to do this. So bookmark the page ;)
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/03/hide-your-email-address-on-websites.html

Google Alphabet & Number Wheel

The alphabet 'a' and number 23 has the highest results in Google.

IT firms stock up on non-engineers -Economic Times

Who says IT is not for non-engineers? Move over IITians, here come the BSc and MSc grads who are developing software for the global market. Technology firms are now hiring non-engineers as well to meet their manpower requirements.

While it costs companies anywhere between Rs 80,000 and a few lakhs to train non-engineers to bring them on par with IIT and regional engineering colleges, the bonus is low attrition rates, availability of a motivated and skilled workforce and lower costs.

Top 10 Strangest Gadgets of the Future -via Slashdot

Would you like to start your day by playing games in the urinal or would you like to see the bread changing its color from off-white to golden brown while its being toasted? Gaming consoles are passe, get up and kick your enemy's ass! Checkout the top 10 strangest gadgets of the future... some of the products/concepts are a must see for those who are into interaction design and new media and the like.

Why we all sell code with bugs -Guardian

Why would a company release a product with known bugs? There are several reasons:

. We care about quality so deeply that we know how to decide which bugs are acceptable and which ones are not.
· It is better to ship a product with a known quality level than to ship a product full of surprises.
· The alternative is to fix them and risk introducing worse bugs.

All the reasons are tied up in one truth: every time you fix a bug, you risk introducing another. Every code change is a risk. If you don't recognise this you will never create a shippable product. At some point, you have to decide which bugs aren't going to be fixed.

There are four questions to ask about every bug. The first two are customer ones, and the next two are developer ones.

1) How bad is its impact? (Severity)
2) How often does it happen? (Frequency)
3) How much effort is required to fix it? (Cost)
4) What is the risk of fixing it? (Risk)

People pay for girls, gambling, games & God -Economic Times

Digital divide? What digital divide? The 4Gs of content sell the world over and there is no reason why it should not be the same in India.

There’s no future for radio or TV acting in isolation. Just like there would be no electric bulb and no photography without disruptive thinking, you need disruptive thinking for Broadcasting too. For instance there are already 10,000 podcasts happening around the world today and yet there have been no coordinated efforts by international broadcasters to be part of I-tunes or align themselves with Google and others. People don’t want to interact with radio stations; they want to interact with friends and family using the stations’ material.

While the Indian media, mobile and IT industries are already serving a huge domestic market of citizens and consumers, the 20-million strong Diaspora would play a pivotal role. A huge hunger for Indian content abroad and the rapid spread of technologies like WiMax could see India emerge at the forefront of the next generation of broadcasting. The day is not far when New Media becomes important enough for traditional broadcasters to start putting in money.

When Excite co-founder Joe Krauss talked about serving Millions of Markets of Dozens instead of Dozens of Markets of Millions, people thought he was ahead of his times. But even Krauss would have found it difficult to imagine a Market of One - today most businesses don’t sell to chunks of the market; they sell to individuals whose socio-economic profile they know very closely.

Open muliple webpage tabs on Firefox start-up -Amit Agarwal

1. From the Firefox Tools menu, choose Options
2. Click on the text box under Homepage - Location(s) group (see screenshot)
3. Type the address of the webpage that you want to load when Firefox loads. Now insert a vertical bar (pipe) | (generally located beside the backspace key on Qwerty keyboards). Next, type the web address of another webpage that you want to load. You can insert any number of pages separated by a pipe symbol.

The next time you start Firefox, each of the webpages will open in separate tabs.

---

Another Quick alternative for launching multiple webpage on Firefox startup

1. Open Firefox browser and load all favorite webpages in separate tabs.
2. Choose Tools - Options - Homepage - Locations. Now click "Use Current Pages"

Firefox will automatically make all the currently open tabs your home pages.

'Micro' wind turbines -News.com

Rather than build farms of towering wind turbines in rural areas, some companies are designing "micro," or small-scale, turbines that fit on top of buildings. The idea is to generate electricity from wind in urban or suburban settings.

The turbines look like large fans in square housings. They are specifically designed for placement on the top of steel-reinforced, flat-roofed commercial buildings. The turbines can be lined up next to each other to aggregate power generation, and the fans will spin even in a very slow wind of a few miles an hour.

The company has set up a few beta sites to test various factors, including its cost-effectiveness, the amount of noise it generates, and the potential impact on birds and bats.

Share your WiFi and the world shares back !

FON is a Global Community of people who share WiFi. Just share your connection and the rest of the Community shares back with you. Join FON and enjoy connecting from anywhere within the WiFi World. Ofcourse at a small cost.

Smart Clothing -Catii.com

Wearables aren't just geeky fantasies, they are serious business, and there are several commercial projects already up and running. Nike has started a tech lab aiming to integrate digital equipment like MP3 players into sports clothes.

Philips’ and Levi Strauss’ ICD+ jackets are equipped with a personal area network, or PAN: an electronic circuit woven into the jacket that serves as the backbone for various devices. Several devices can be clipped on to a PAN, and they can be centrally controlled by a remote control with a small display that alerts users to every incoming phone call, e-mail, or the title of a song playing on an MP3 player.

British Telecom is working with the military forces of several countries to develop clothes which can change their thickness and therefore thermal properties according to the outside temperature. Another design splashes medicines onto a wound when a soldier is hit by a bullet. They are also seeing the use of optical fiber woven into the clothes. When a soldier is injured, the fibers are broken and information about the wound location can be relayed to field medics, who can use the information to prioritize casualties.

Millions of micro-capsules can also be built into clothing and allow camouflage to adapt dynamically to the surroundings, changing the colors and patterns of the clothes.

Communications between the various devices could use fibers built into clothes, with their data coverage increased to as much as 35 feet using the new Bluetooth technologies. Another technique uses the body itself to transmit signals at surprisingly high data rates.

Motorola adds Google to mobiles -BBC News

Motorola said it would introduce Google's software technology to many of its new handsets. Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said he believed most people would in the future access the internet using their mobile phones. "People are going to spend all their time on it eventually," he said.

Blog Plagiarism -OmMalik

This had to happen. Some people simply lift articles from other blogs, make slight changes and post it as their own writing. These blogs ONLY exist because they can make money from Google AdSense. The issue is important enough for Google to step in, and do something.

Even I do it, but I post only excerpts, give full credits and link to the original site, and ya there ain't any google ads on my site.

Same Language Subtitling - Google's Philanthropic Efforts

PlanetRead, an organization seeking to improve literacy in India is using an extremely simple concept: same-language subtitling. By adding subtitles to Bollywood films and popular TV shows, people who have low literacy skills are able to get regular reading practice based on songs and shows they know by associating the words on the screen with their meanings. Results have been very positive, and the program will expand across 10 states in India, potentially reaching hundreds of millions of people.

Sell CPU Cycles to CPU Share -Om Malik

CPUShare has been founded with the goal of connecting together the computers of the Internet in order to create a general purpose Low Cost and World Wide Supercomputer available to everybody to use in a matter of minutes, controlled by a market for the CPU resources that chooses the price of the CPU resources using the supply and demand law in real time.

The likely buyers of these CPU cycles can quickly build their own grids for a few million dollars. During the 1990s bubble many grid/distributed computing companies raised hundreds of millions of dollars in an attempt to build a processing marketplace. Almost all failed.

The problem here is CPUShare works on linux and there aren't too many Linux desktops out there. And another big big factor is electricity - the cost of power exceeds the cost of the hardware!

2005: Year of the Balance of Power -Emergic

This year has been a year that has underscored several...balance of power developments.

In Politics and in Economics, the US dominance has been partially normalized by China and India, both emerging superpowers.

Close to home, in high tech, Google�s absurd rise has stopped Microsoft in its track, posing an alternate power block that challenges many existing assumptions.

In Silicon Valley, Google and Yahoo have even started challenging the power that Venture Capitalists have commanded thus far against entrepreneurs, and by encouraging entrepreneurs to bootstrap their startups, followed by exiting into one of the two (or into one of their competitors).

And one last balance of power example : the dominance of mainstream media has been shredded by the emerging democratic new media publishing trends and their supporting infrastructure that has rapidly matured this year (Blogs, Podcasts, Video-on-Demand, Microcontent, Micropayment, acceptable DRM standards, viable ad-supported business models, etc.).

Now Phirangs can’t Work in Desi BPOs -Economic Times

In a written reply to a query raised in the Rajya Sabha on Thursday, minister of state for information technology, Shakeel Ahmed, said requests from foreign nationals for employment visa for jobs, for which a large number of qualified Indians is available, will not be considered.

He said that only such foreigners who are skilled and qualified professionals and are being engaged or appointed by a company or an industry will be eligible to get an employment visa in the first place. Nearly 2,000 foreigners are working in the domestic ITES sector.

I think this is absurd and a totally irrational decision. Just to garner a couple of votes, these babus are putting entire BPO industry at stake.