<3 this. Here is the link: http://www.shof.msrcsites.co.uk/pcxmas.html
(Thanks Jeff)
IndiaRail Info is an interesting Google Maps mashup that helps you visualize the current geographical location of any train in India. Just type train name or train number and check its exact location on the map.
India Rail Info has a database of all trains and railway stations in India
For example, the Bandra Garib Rath Express (2910) has crossed Kota junction at 8:23pm IST. Unfortunately this site does not extrapolate this data to guess the location between two junctions, so the train is still shown at Kota. Thanks Info-Madness.
Related posts:
Check the Current Geographical Location of any Indian Railways Train - Digital Inspiration
I joined 24-Hour Fitness because the salespeople don't slide notes across the table and say things like, "How 'bout this? Can you live with this number?" My answer to that question is always the same: "If you can't say the cost out loud, it's too much."
India is currently the 2nd largest Mobile Market in the world after China, adding nearly 10-12 million subscribers on average monthly.
At the end of April 2009, Indian Mobile subscriber base was pegged at 403.66 million, as per recent TRAI number.
Most of the Metro's and big cities have nearly come to a saturation point, however, the current phase of growth in Indian Mobile Market is in Rural areas that is now accounting for majority of growth in mobile space.
Having said that, I thought it would be interesting for our readers to know how 270 million odd Urban subscribers use their mobile phone
So here you go, some of the numbers may surprise you, while some may disappoint, but it sure makes a good reading.
Nearly 10% Delhi Mobile subscribers use Social Networking services on their mobile phones, followed by Mumbai & Chennai. No doubt, I see hoards of Delhites, tweeting from their mobile phones !
Nearly 18.5 million Indian Urban Mobile subscribers used their mobile phones for searches, with Google taking the numero-uno position with 5.76 million followed by yahoo with 4.58 million.
A quarter (25%) of all urban Indians who use IM over their phone do so from an application that came preloaded in the phone.
Aha…surprises here – Yahoo! Messenger has narrowly edged Google's Gtalk to become most popular messenger service with urban Indian mobile users, with a 18.3% market share followed closely by Google Talk (17.8%). Nice to see Yahoo beating Google, atleast somewhere :). I am sure though next few months will see Google coming to No.1.
The state and Government run companies seem to score well in reasonable offerings column, while MTNL and Vodafone score in the reliable customer support offering. Aircel followed by Airtel top when it comes to offering its subscribers diverse range of mobile products.
Offcourse they do, that too in large numbers!
And what is the source of these SMS Contest? offcourse, it is dominated with TV. all reality TVs, song and dance shows choose their winners via some or the other SMS contest and India just loves it.
have a look
86% of all SMS contest originate from TV, followed by Newspapers and Internet.
Here are some numbers on how Urban India uses the Mobile Value Added Services offered by Telecom providers.
Nearly 56 Million urban Indians used a VAS related SMS subscription service in March/April 2009 – out of which Reliance Mobile CDMA accounted for a quarter of all subscribers to VAS SMS subscription service, followed by Bharti Airtel (18%) and Vodafone (14%).
Once conclusion I can definitely make from these numbers is that majority of mobile users in India fall into Age group of 16-25 years !
No surprises here – Unlimited Internet Access & better offers on SMS bundles are the two VAS options that Indian urban mobile phone users look at while deciding on a service.
Nearly 98 million of all mobile users have used mobile phones to recharge their card or pay their phone bill –The second most popular M-Commerce activity is buying movie tickets (39.67 million)
"Finding out who called" and "informing people when busy" are the two other most popular Value added services used by Urban India. Missed call alerts is used by almost 110 million urban Indians while Talk/Voice SMS is used by almost 80 million.
Note: The above graphs / numbers are created by www.vitalanalytics.in. (let us know if you have any questions on these numbers)
To answer your comments around social networking, Social networking sites can be accessed via sms as well, you dont necessarily need gprs enabled handsets to access the same, the numbers we have take that into account
The number is 11.4% for Orkut, facebook though increasing is still behind;( http://tr.im/pQRD ) article on business week, that further solidifies this. Anything under 2% we do not track, due to the low usage we will not be able project the numbers reliably.
Giving up my iPod for a Walkman (Thanks, John!)It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.
Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn't is "shuffle", where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down "rewind" and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured.
I told my dad about my clever idea. His words of warning brought home the difference between the portable music players of today, which don't have moving parts, and the mechanical playback of old. In his words, "Walkmans eat tapes". So my clumsy clicking could have ended up ruining my favourite tape, leaving me music-less for the rest of the day
 Date:18/06/2009 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2009/06/18/stories/2009061852330300.htm Back
Kerala - Kochi KOCHI: Engineering colleges affiliated to the Cochin University of Science and Technology have put up its worst performance ever in the B. Tech supplementary examination 2009, with only 23 out of the 1,358 students passing the test. The pass percentage, according to official records, is a mere 1.69. Nine out of the 21 affiliated colleges set another record, with all the students from these institutions failing to clear the examination. The colleges include College of Engineering, Adoor; College of Engineering, Poonjar; College of Engineering, Kidangoor; College of Engineering, Karunagapally; College of Engineering, Trikaripur; TKM Institute of Technology, Kollam; Sarabhai Institute of Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram; College of Engineering, Cherthala; and M.G. College of Engineering, Thiruvananthapuram. Seven colleges had the record of having one student each passing the examination. The colleges include Model Engineering College, Thrikkakara; College of Engineering, Kallooppara; College of Engineering, Thalassery, Co-operative Institute of Technology, Vadakara; Toc H Institute of Science and Technology, Aarakunnam; College of Engineering, Attingal; and College of Engineering, Kottarakara. College of Engineering, Munnar, had the distinction of having two students clearing the examination. College of Engineering, Chengannur, was in the third position with three students passing. The colleges that figured top in the list include School of Engineering, Thrikkakara, and Cochin University College of Engineering, Pulinkunnu. Four students each from these colleges cleared the examination. Out of the total 1,358 students, only three students won distinction while 19 got first class marks. © Copyright 2000 - 2009 The Hindu |
Yesterday's Google I/O keynote highlighted the power of HTML 5 to match functionality long experienced in desktop applications. This morning, Google plans to announce an HTML 5-based application - still very much in the early stages of development - that represents a profound advance in the state of the art.
Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the original creators of Google Maps, will take the stage to unveil their latest project, Google Wave. As Lars describes it, "We set out to answer the question: What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?"
That is exactly the right question, and one that every developer should be asking him or herself. The world of computing has changed, profoundly, yet so many of our applications bear the burden of decades of old thinking. We need to challenge our assumptions and re-imagine the tools we take for granted. It's perhaps no accident that this project, carried out secretly at Google's Sydney office over the past two years, had the code name Walkabout. That's the Australian aboriginal tradition of going off for an extended period to retrace the songlines and learn the world anew.
In answering the question, Jens, Lars, and team re-imagined email and instant-messaging in a connected world, a world in which messages no longer need to be sent from one place to another, but could become a conversation in the cloud. Effectively, a message (a wave) is a shared communications space with elements drawn from email, instant messaging, social networking, and even wikis.
It turns out that Jens had the idea back in 2004, when Google first acquired the company that became Google Maps. As Lars tells the story:
We were excited to join Google and help create what would become Google Maps. But we also started thinking about what might come next for us after maps.
As always, Jens came up with the answer: communication. He pointed out that two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the '60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point....
We started with a set of tough questions:
Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
- Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
- What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers' current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?
Responding in Context
Let's say I want to communicate with someone. I start a wave, just as I might start an email message. The recipient(s) see an incoming wave, just as they see an email today. Where the magic starts is with replies. In email, you have the choice of including no context, only a portion of the message you're replying to, or the whole thing. In the first case, you need to go back to the original message for context; in the second, you have wasted copies going back and forth. Come into the middle of a long thread and you may be replying to a discussion that has already moved on or covered the point you want to express. But what if there were only one message, shared in the cloud? Now, your comment on the second paragraph is attached directly to that point in the conversation. There are no redundant copies of portions of the message, as replies are seen in context.
As you can see in the screenshot below (click to enlarge), a Wave inbox looks much like an email inbox. But look to the right, and you can see how the replies are embedded right into the middle of the original message, so Stephanie's question about what camera Jens used for his photos appears right in context.
Now, you might ask how well this works for long, complex messages rather than the short one shown in the demo. I don't know the answer, but I suspect that Wave will be even stronger in that case. Our experience with collaborative editing of book manuscripts at O'Reilly suggests that the amount and quality of participation goes up radically when comments can be interleaved at a paragraph level.
Is it a particle or a wave? It's both.
First generation email/IM integration let you see when someone was online, and opt to instant message someone rather than send them an email. Wave simply erases the distinction.
If both people are online at the same time, a wave acts just like an instant message -- except that you see each character as it is typed, just like in subethaedit. "In our experience, a lot of time in IM is spent waiting for the other person to press 'Done'," says Lars. (However, it is possible to set Wave to hold your messages till you are done.)
A key point here is that Google's relentless focus on reducing the latency of online actions is bringing the online experience closer and closer to our real world experience of face-to-face communication. When you're talking with someone, you know what someone is saying before they finish their sentence. You can respond, or even finish their sentence for them. So too with Wave.
The real-time connectedness of Wave is truly impressive. Drop photos onto a wave and see the thumbnails appear on the other person's machine before the photos are even finished uploading.
Step by step playback draws a cheer
Let's say you are added to a conversation (a wave) that has been going on for a long time? You can be added at any relevant point, not just the end. But even cooler, you can do a playback of the entire evolution of the conversation.
But wait: there's more! Let's say you want to edit your message (or even a message that was written by another participant in the wave). Yes, you can. The original author is notified, but every participant can see that the message has been modified, and if they want, can replay the changes.
This leads to a change in behavior: conversations become shared documents.
The screenshot below shows a simple example, as Gregory and Casey collaborate to produce a good answer to Dan's question. As Stephanie Hannon, the product manager for Googe Wave, said to me, "In Wave, you don't have to make the choice between discussing and collaborating."
As anyone who's used version control knows, a document with lots of discussion and edits can become pretty messy. No problem. You can export an edited wave as a new wave, and start over. "One of our design principles," says Lars, "is that the product of a wave can be as important as the original wave."
Nor do you need to include everyone in every part of a conversation. Essentially, Lars, says, "waves are tree-shaped sets of messages. You can shape a subtree, or a sub-conversation and limit the set of participants in any way you like."
Wave as a Platform
Wave is more than a product. As Lars explains:
The Google Wave product (available as a developer preview) is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It's an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave).Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.
The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the "live" concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone's Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.
Anyone who's followed my writing knows that I'm a huge fan of simple systems with extensible architectures. So I was excited to see that the team didn't lard lots of features into the core product, but instead added new features via the Wave APIs, much as they hope third party developers will do.
One useful extension, Polly (Poll-y) lets you incorporate polls into a wave. In the wave shown below, participants are asked whether they can make it to a party. Responses appear immediately in the wave. That's the way these things ought to work! No jumping to a website to see the results of an Evite or a poll.
(I should note that the ever-prescient Jon Udell showed how to hack existing tools to similar effect in his 2001 book Practical Internet Groupware. It was one of the books I'm proudest of publishing, despite its commercial failure. It was just too far ahead of its time.)
The API has been used to build a bunch of cool extensions: Bloggy, a blog client, lets you make a blog post as a wave. When people comment, they join the conversation. Spelly is a spell-checker that uses the entire corpus of the web as its dictionary. Linky is a link-recognition engine that is clever enough to recognize that the link you just entered is a YouTube video, or a link to a photo, and give you the option to embed the target of the link into the wave. There's even a twitter client - you can tweet into and out of a wave! And of course, buggy, a bug-reporting tool that can also be a participant in a wave.
Wave can also be used as the base for interactive games. For example, here's a real-time interactive chess game in Wave:
Open Source, Open Protocol, and Federated Wave Clouds
Google wants other providers to adopt Wave - the protocol allows federation between independent Wave clouds. The team hopes that Wave will become as ubiquitous and interoperable as email and instant messaging, not just a Google product.
I support this vision. The Wave team has done a great job, but for Wave to really succeed, it needs to become a new fundamental service on the net. An open protocol means that anyone can build their own Wave services - everything from Wave servers to Wave extensions. But open source means that people can push the envelope in adapting the service to new environments, devices, and use cases.
I'm hopeful that the industry will take up the challenge, and build on what is being shown at Google I/O this morning. Eric Raymond noted that every open source project begins with a plausible promise. There's no question that the plausible promise is on stage this morning. I hope the folks in the audience at Google I/O, as well as those at Yahoo!, Microsoft, and elsewhere, get on the bandwagon as well. I'm eager to move from email and IM to Wave!
Aside: The fact that this application was built using GWT and HTML 5 really emphasizes Vic Gundotra's points from yesterday, that web applications can not only match, but can even beat the functionality of native apps. It's not just HTML 5, though. It's the commitment to the lightweight nature of the web, to real-time, to lightweight components connected by open protocols rather than to monolithic systems.
Make it New!
Ezra Pound once wrote: ""The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth." And elsewhere: "Make it new!"
Even more than the application itself, I love the way Wave doesn't just build on what went before but starts over. In demonstrating the power of the shared, real-time information space, Jens and Lars show a keen understanding of how the cloud changes applications.
When I saw Wave for the first time on Monday, I realized that we're at a kind of DOS/Windows divide in the era of cloud applications. Suddenly, familiar applications look as old-fashioned as DOS applications looked as the GUI era took flight. Now that the web is the platform, it's time to take another look at every application we use today, and ask the same question Lars and Jens asked themselves: "What would this look like if we invented it today instead of twenty-five years ago?"
For more information
The following links may not be live until the end of this morning's keynote at about 10:15 am Pacific time:
wave.google.com: the eventual home for Google Wave. For now a place to learn more and sign up to be notified when we launch
code.google.com/apis/wave: home for the API, documentation and sample code.
waveprotocol.org: home for the protocol specs (draft), whitepapers and a discussion forum about the open google wave protocol
Update
The Google I/O demo of Wave is now available on YouTube. It's embedded below:
Sure, you know Steve Jobs, the Woz, and Bill Gates, but do you know the name Ajay Bhatt? He invented the USB, and in this new commercial from Intel he's being given the celebrity treatment - a premise that's equal parts inspiring and amusing.
So you've probably heard the news now, that Oracle have agreed to buy Sun, the makers of Solaris, SPARC chips, lots of application servers, servers and storage units and of course Java. IBM were originally in the running but backed-off due to anti-trust concerns, now it looks like Oracle have won the prize. So what does this mean for Oracle business intelligence and data warehousing?
Well, to be honest it's not all that clear, especially seeing as Oracle's favoured hardware partners and operating system seem to be HP and Linux rather than Sun and Solaris. Sun weren't an especially big player, directly, in the BI&DW market, although their hardware used to power most cutting-edge data warehouses back in the late 90's and even today, those customers who've not gone down the RAC route tend to use Solaris and SPARC hardware to host their large-scale data warehouses. I've not personally perceived Sun as being so relevant these days, with the architectural advantages of SPARC chips being less pronounced these days, and a general move amongst the industry towards Linux and commodity blade hardware. Sun do in fact have their own DW appliance initiative, in conjunction with Greenplum and PostgreSQL, which presumably won't be around for much longer, and in fact it's in this area that I can see Sun's hardware business having its focus in the future - as a means for Oracle to build off of what they've done with Exadata and Database Machine to create highly-tuned, highly-optimized appliances for the running of Oracle databases, application servers and Fusion applications.
I guess also part of the move was defensive in that Oracle wanted to firstly, make sure whoever bought Sun had the same commitment to Java (on which most of Oracle's products are based), and secondly make sure someone like IBM didn't get Java and therefore place much of Oracle's architectural underpinnings in the hands of a major competitor. Oracle's own BI products are a mix of pure Java (the legacy BI tools like Discoverer), bits of C++, Java and .NET (from the Siebel side) and a mish-mash of lots of technologies from the Hyperion side. Going forward, I would imagine this means Java will be even more central to Oracle's (BI) tools strategy, we'll have even more Java application servers (though presumably Weblogic will stay the strategic direction), and we'll have even more focus on end-to-end BI and DW appliances; and maybe, we'll see mySQL start to appear in entry-level BI products from Oracle, or even have Oracle BI support/ship mySQL in the BI SE One variant? We'll have to wait and see.
So, it's a takeover that's obviously not got BI and DW as it's rationale, but I think we'll see spin-off benefits in the areas of DW appliances, more optimized storage solutions and perhaps optimization going through to the server, network and even the operating system level, especially if the engineers behind Solaris and ZFS start to contribute towards Oracle's Linux, storage and hardware strategy. For the time being though we'll have to wait and see what happens, one thing I do know though is that surely, they'll either have to run a technology Open World and an apps Open World separately now, or maybe even move to Las Vegas in the future if Oracle want to run a single annual event for all their customers?
James McGovern, of Enterprise Architecture, writes:
So, if quality can be lower in enterprise in-house software, then that allows for lower-quality resources from Indian outsourcing firms to maintain it. Remember that good is good enough and it doesn't make sense for architects to expend such energy churning on better ways of developing higher quality working software.
Indian outsourcing has caused many to lower their standards and therefore the opportunity to abuse is rampant. Methodologies such as extreme programming encourage merciless refactoring while Indian outsourcing has taught us that refactoring is nothing but overhead as you have to write comprehensive documentation in order to get working software. Sometimes the effort but into documentation makes refactoring a non-starter.
McGovern's recent posts have been pretty cynical about Indian outsourcing and I suppose it has some roots in his actual experiences. So I am not going to quibble and say he is wrong, because he will be obviously right with what he has experienced personally. That being said, I think he has a limited view of why many companies outsource outside the United States, including to Eastern Europe, India and East Asia.
What I am writing below is based on meetings and conversations with CEOs, VPs and other executives in charge of outsourcing decisions. Obviously, you cannot take any one person's word at face value, but when you hear the same reasons cited by multiple people, you start seeing trends. Let me start with saying that cost is a major factor, but not for the common reasons you would think. No executive talks of costs in the context of replacing existing costly resources with new inexpensive resources. Instead, the typical reasons cited are as follows:
Cost is an important (if not the most important) factor because it is the easiest and most unambiguous one to measure. The compensation of most executives is determined by how much money they could make or how much they could save. But to assume that they are only obsessed with the bottom line figure is wrong. If that were the case, every action could be taken by only considering the short-term cost analysis, where you don't want to introduce any new costs.
But as you can see, in the above cases, although the executives are trying to save money, overall they are increasing costs. They are not shutting down the existing development team. They are augmenting the team with new members for the purpose of performing projects that add to the company's value. This adds more costs, so what the executives are doing is not so much as reducing costs, but reducing the rate of growth of expenses.
They could do this in a variety of ways, of course: Hire permanent workers, hire consultants, hire interns, buy off-the-shelf products, outsource to a local firm, outsource to a firm somewhere in the United States, outsource to someone outside the country, automate. And each has its pros and cons. The cost of the project is affected by risks of each approach and this includes quality too, because poor quality increases maintenance costs too.
There are two arguments that cannot simultaneously exist, which is that foreign programmers are both inexpensive and of poor quality. If an inexpensive foreign programmer produces code of really poor quality, the rational thing to do for a cost-conscious executive would be to use only domestic programmers. There would be no point in outsourcing if a programmer in an outsourcing country is more expensive than one in the United States because their poor quality cancels the benefit of their lower per-hour costs. One could argue that maybe some executive are dumb, but that does not account for the tens of thousands of jobs that have been outsourced.
The assumption that Indian outsourcing is associated with low quality may be satisfying to some United States programmers, but it is a dangerous assumption for several reasons.
I call it dangerous because it doesn't help the displaced American programmer from understanding the high-level economic trend that is causing the job loss. Both national parties in the United States (and most parties in the Western world) are non-protectionist. They favor free markets and open trade. This means a much more competitive market for all companies. Blaming any one element that causes job losses in a particular sector is missing the bigger picture.
For instance, as Nick Carr wrote in "The Big Switch", a trend that will cause the loss of many IT jobs is the rise of cloud computing. It will mean the end of many system and database administration jobs, as small and large companies move their data and processing to the servers of Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Is it worthwhile to complain that cloud computing may perhaps have less performance than a finely-tuned Oracle machine on a Solaris box? It may be satisfying to think you (as a sysadmin) have been replaced by an inferior solution, but that satisfaction is all you get.
What is the answer for the American programmer? If you cannot lower one's wages, you has to provide greater value. Quality is greater value, but that may not be enough to justify those higher salaries. Corporations (and smaller companies) with access to the entire globe may not agree to the monetary value you place on your existing skills and quality. So the right answer is what new portfolio of skills will appeal better to employers and executives?
Better code quality is not enough. If you improve it, there is no guarantee that the Eastern Europeans and Filipinos will not equal you tomorrow because they are learnable skills. But the American programmer will always have the strength in understanding American businesses, rules, customs and traditions. They can be better analysts and managers. Although the Internet has dulled this advantage, Americans can take greater advantage of the wealth of experience in Silicon Valley and other technology hotspots as well as the many first-class universities in the US to become better architects and designers in emerging technologies. Finally, they can embrace globalization to obtain greater value through mixing and matching development resources from across the world.
