My phone and email are defunct

Overall the last one year at least, I have not made many calls using telephonic facility of my mobile phone or the ubiquitous email for communication. Not that my communication has reduced or the complexity has reduced. Just that the channel and mode have changed.

• I have conveniently moved to a text (messaging) mode to communicate with friends and relatives. This is asynchronous and non-intrusive. My friend/relative can message me back,again being non-intrusive to me. A phone call is only for immediate action or an emergency. A phone call made in an ad hoc manner makes the receiver put down or stop whatever he/she is doing and attend to your call.  And a phone call factored in with all the courtesies will need a dedicated 10 mins per call. Imagine this - if we have 5 relatives and 10 friends in our inner circle, this means 15 X 10 minutes on phone calls alone. 
• On the other hand a phone call is absolutely essential when you need to influence or intensely communicate something to some one in business or personal lives. However when I say a 'phone call' what I mean is a call using the internet. 
• With 3G on my phone and with wifi in almost every place, nothing prevents me from texting someone and asking 'can we do a skype call'? I then Skype/Google Hangout/Use any video call over the internet to do those special calls.
• It is a similar situation with Gmail or Yahoo mail that I used for personal email services. Most of my Gmails I get are promotional mails or spam. The Yahoo group that I had for a purpose has given away to a facebook page. 
• I have at least five different chat clients on my phone largely because I have friends distributed across them. 
• And Whatsapp is the king! Whether I chat with my teenage boys or my friends, it is so convenient to just use Whatsapp.

Now where is all this leading to?

1. I'm tied to my phone I check it once midnight. I cannot be without it because I have carved out a habit around that. Can I divorce myself from the phone? Impossible unless I become a monk in the Himalayas.

2. My personal space has become slightly more public. (For people of Gen-Y it has full changed). I like 'click a pic and post' just to share momentary points of interest with my friends. Sometimes I make remarks just because the phone enables me to do that and I'm not sure if this is a good thing. I have to be on guard about what I share and what I don't.

3. I'm creating and contributing to the mounds of inconsequential data that is growing exponentially. Is this even sustainable? Companies in network, storage and compute spaces are making merry just because people like me want to' create data once use it once and forget it forever' as opposed to 'create once use it forever'.

4. I'm creating more security issues and therefore better business for the security companies and hackers. 

Vicious loop :-)

Life cycle of a social identity

I recently read an article classifying what are the basic building components for a social media and how to accentuate some of them but not all of them for effective communication.

The building blocks or dimensions as you would call them are

• Your Identity
• Your Reputation (What you would like other to think of you)
• Your Relationships 
• Groups
• Conversations
• Sharing

While Linkedin profiles concentrate on the top three (the Identity, Reputation, Relationships) the buddy social networking sites such as facebook maintain the last three (Groups, Conversations, Sharing) without bothering too much on identity and reputation.  

Most of us have two identities. One, a professional, accountable, matured self on LinkedIn and another child-like, silly, funny, no-image-to-keep-up self on Facebook and smaller social media.

Organizations also mature the same manner. Small teams with all members equal, with no reputation to keep share the maximum and are most productive. However as they become more and more successful, their reputation grows more and then they fall into the 'maintain-my-image' league and become less productive.

Children have the latter type of network where conversations, sharing, fighting-reconciling take their primary attention and identity or reputation have no meaning at all. Is this the reason that they are so happy all the time?

Coincidentally, our own philosophy says that there is no identity for any of us and there is no reputation to keep because each one of us have our own paths and no one really crosses another's. 

Comments welcome.

Evernote versus Google Drive

For a week or more now, I have been without my personal laptop. My family has a laptop and that is common property and is time shared. However I have a personal iPad and this is version 1  (read no camera) which I purchased when tablets were just being born. I also use an iphone 4 (not 4S) as my humble personal phone.


I had a need to create, modify documents, keep spreadsheets, store some emails, store To-Do notes , store addresses and yes, keep some images. Being a lazy geek, I wanted to have access to the same documents irrespective of which device I have on my hand at that point in time.  I wanted to edit part of the document when I was in my study room (desktop), a part when I was in the garden (iPhone) and a part when I was in the living room (iPad).  
Just a few days of usage compelled me to write this comparison table of joys and sorrows of document-management-by-a-layperson-using-slightly-outdated-devices. 

Summary: Use Evernote if your documents are light-weight and need easy editing (e.g. to-do,images, email copies, HTML text) and G Drive if your documents are to be treated seriously (spreadsheets, projects to be shared with others, PDFs etc) which is not exactly easy editing oriented.

Another summary:  Evernote = For the Young ; 

Google Drive = For the Mature.... LOL  :-D :-D 

Now, this is not a comprehensive comparison of the two documents-on-cloud technologies. However I wanted to share the delights and woes I encountered in this case.

*This table formatting was done by blogger from Evernote. See the effect for yourself.

	iPad v1	iPhone 4	Desktop
ENote	Creating a document : Easy due to form factor	Not easy due to form factor	Easy just like MS Word
	Editing a document: No rich text support. It could be because I have an older version of iOS and hence older version of Evernote. No notifications to guide user.	Forget editing with iPhone.	Easy just like MS Word
	Reading a document: Easy and beautiful	Easy and beautiful	Easy and beautiful
	Type of document: Text , audio clip and image insertion possible; aesthetically very pleasing.	+ image capture + Rich Text	All
	Mailing with Postbox or sharing the doc for multiple users (projects) : Not obvious	Not obvious	Not obvious
	Traditional folder structure : Not obvious (intentionally perhaps)	Not obvious	Not obvious
GDrive	Creating a document : Not easy due to poor UI (the iPad app is yet to come)	Bad	Just like any file on my desktop; Google formats may not always be WYSIWYG
	Editing a document: Use my Safari browser; not pleasing; fat fingers will disrupt	Don't even try	Same as Google Docs - nothing great as user experience but great on performance
	Reading a document: Very Poor; Pagination , magnification etc not up to the mark	Don't try unless it is a simple three liner	Same as desktop
	Type of document: Great and I did not feel inhibited in any way. I can store most types of documents.	Same as iPad	Very easy and very traditional mind-set interface
	Ease of storing/availability from cloud: Stored instantly; Very good performance	I wouldn't try due to form factor	Just my desktop folder synced up and down
	New-Gen features such as add audio clip notes, click anything as image and search it not available	NA	NA

Now how did I edit this document?  Its obvious - I edited this with Evernote, cut-pasted it on Blogger's editor but will store it on Google Drive ! After all I have documents from seven years on Google Drive upgraded from Google Docs.  Reliability is higher priority than aesthetics !

GroupOn principles

Most of us know about Groupon by now. This is a company, that helps companies give Coupons in bulk (Groups) and essentially brokers a deal for the customer to a cheaper deal. Its been there less than two years now and if my memory serves me right, it has shot up from 1 customer to about 20 million customers already.

Groupon does some simple stuff.
1. Geo or location based services
2. Any mom and pop shop can offer a Groupon and get business
3. Volume based
4. People love trying out new things, but they don’t want to spend too much on new things that they’re unsure of
5. Provides additional services such as customer support, additional context, tips etc. For example, I mentioned my location in US. It instantly recognized that Iam an Indian and showed me a Group from an Indian restaurant with a 50% off for dinner. It also gave me context including how long the restaurant has been there, the history of its owners and tips for choosing a menu etc.

So, I, as a customer, not only got a economic deal but also got valuable advise which is emotionally satisfying.

The psychology of the human mind always wants a 'gift'. We have been built up with a tendency to get a gift from childhood. Most salary packages that are readily accepted are those with benefits and perks than those without benefits but have the internal costs factored into the main salary package. A 'deal' is a gift and the human mind says 'I got something free'. Groupon not only emotionally satisfies you with a gift-ing deal but also provides you additional friendly advise that makes you even more secure.

I would love to have similar benefits in my home city - Bangalore.

Justdial.com is my favourite dial up service for anything I want. While it is a great reference service, I do not get anything as a 'deal' as a customer.

Similarly with makemytrip.com or Indian Railways ticketing site or the PVR cinema site.

If I can get a free deal if I refer three other friends (remember Amway and those door to door reps?).

A market place should not only sell something to the customer but also 'unsell' something from the customer. Makes sense?

The margins will come.

Whats cooking inside the cloud kitchen

Whats cooking inside the cloud kitchen

With cloud computing and all the associated jargons IaaS, PaaS and Saas establishing themselves very well, I was curious to know what are the new products being developed for the market.

I ruled out all the network allocation, hybrid clouds, virtualization, monitoring, provisioning software because a lot of them are already available in the market and they will not complete the cloud picture unless we know if the core businesses are making products for the cloud.

Interesting observations:

1. The amusing one that caught my eye: Cloud Data Center Feng Shui.

Feng Shui, just like Vaastu, is an ancient science that recomends the best location of water bodies, fire appliances, wind directions etc for a building for the best health and harmony of its residents.

I was surprised to see Feng Shui for Data Centers. There are a few products that advises how each of the appliances, servers, network components, storage components should be placed according to 'what they are for'. For example,

- The Security, Availability components as RED

- Colloboration servers - Pink

- Staffing Pink, Budgets - Purple etc.

I believe colors mean a lot in Feng Shui and I don't know whether the colors are meant to be painted on appliances or if they signify something else (apologize for lack of knowledge).

Well, data centers are finally meant to deliver high efficiencies and a bit of Feng Shui may not harm that.

2. Bio-Informatics

I found couple of products/apps being available for highly data intensive stuff such as Genome research. One product offered configurable base images for scientists that can be deployed on Amazon or Terremark's cloud. The image offered multi-tenant genome and related biologial databases and also offered highly specialized search algoritms such as BLAST which is a collection of searching programs for biological sequence databases.

3. XML Mimic software for SOA based apps:

I liked the idea behind some of these. When your apps are deployed on the cloud and you need XML based responses, XML mimicking software can generate XML responses for you. This accelerates protyping as well as quick tetsing - which are so important in the time-to-value curve of cloud based deployments.

4. Host of innovative products for optimizing federated searches inside clouds, logging mechanisms across heterogeneous stacks, schema crawlers that will dump you all database schemas used inside the cloud. All for better developer productivity.

5. Also a new league of services that 'transform legacy application to the cloud'. The cream of all the products that I saw was this one. Desktop as a service. (www.desktone.com). The website does not offer us the explanation about how you can take your desktop based enterprise application, hand it off to this service provider who will convert this into a hosted or cloud based service. I'm curious to know if it is just plain web based wrapper on top of desktop or if the original desktop product will be reengineered and layered for the cloud. Great initiative though.

Using Muscle power to go Green!

Using Muscle power to go Green!

Microsoft is reportedly coming with a hand powered remote control that doesn't need batteries. " When the user turns the knob, the microcontroller powers up and samples the inputs from the supply circuit" - read the news here.

Although this might appear trivial and too small for the Green initiatives, every small effort helps. On a lighter vein, imagine if:
- Every woman from rural India who grinds wheat flour or idli batter on the stone grinder is given a 'plug in' that will automatically convert hand power to energy.
- Human pulled rickshaws are incentivised to convert wheel rotations into energy
- Couch potatoes given an option to convert heat generated in the seat to energy
- Venom spitting and ferocious politicians converting their decibel levels into energy
- Bollywood dancers given an attachment inside their socks that will convert movements into energy
- Every road hump and crater fitted with an attachment that will convert vehicular thrust into energy.

Read the book "Touch the Earth"

iPad - Pleasant surprise

iPad - just like each one of you I have been waiting for this device. The rumored Appale's Tablet is finally out and its a sweet revelation to most of us that its on expected lines.

I was 'waiting' for this because

- Although Kindle and Sony Reader are great ebook readers they produced a set of issues for me in India. One, they were priced > 300$ and well, just for reader feature and a little bit of 'other freebies' I did not want to pay so much. Two, the data formats such as PDF, Images, Graphs etc are all supported but not without the small prints. While I live in India, where Amazon still has no provider for its services, its quite a hassle to convert all data formats using Kindle because every non-native content is sent to Kindle's server for 'conversion' and then brought back.

India has 23% of its population on the mobile but Amazon has not tied up with any ISP provider as far as I know. Does any reader support Indian languages?

- An e-Reader was one more device I had to carry. There's the laptop, the power cord, the head phones for Skype, the mobile phone already in my travel bag and now one more device that I must bother about. A dream device would have had all features into one with intuitive UI and an optimum form factor that makes it easy to 'handle'.

When the rumors were around for the iPad most people guessed that it would be a tablet. However what surprised me is the features offered for the price. It's a Big iPhone plus e-Reader. (Disclaimer: I still don't know if I can read all types of documents on it). I expect iPad to extend its tentacles everywhere because of its extensibility, the SDK the same as that of iPhone and hence the power that third party developers have will only add to customer usage and pleasure of use.

I was an iPod basher about a few years ago because eberything about it was curtailing and propreitary. However iPod has become a 'good boy' now with its 'Home Sharing' of files with which family members can share the songs or podcasts. New iTunes also converts non-native formats such as realplayer formats by implicitly importing the formats. Podcasts have extended themselves to iTunes U where you can download university lessons on any topic thats available. If Only IPod or iPad can transfer songs without a separate adapter or a dedicated laptop! Thats the last mile that Apple has to go. Extensible, yet exclusive is the key.

Well done Apple. No beta, no trial versions and a big bang release of a new device! I'm waiting to check out the different versions.