In the Forbes Asia June 16, 2008 issue I came across these interesting facts about Adobe (the makers of Photoshop and Flash).

• According to Adobe, Flash Player is the most widely available software on Earth (Is it?)
• For every 1000 users of free Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Acrobat Reader, there is a Web Programmer or Graphic Designer behind creating the content
• 80% of Creative Professionals or 2.6 Million people use Adobe's Creative Suite
• Adobe has 1 Million developers using its products compared 4 Million Software developers using Microsoft .NET Tools

The other day on the Internet I saw the above photos of the next version of One Laptop Per Child Program. What struck me very interesting was the absence of Keyboard (hence absence of mechanical failures) and the ability for two children to share it at the same time - very valuable in developing countries and for play. You have a touch-screen that works as a keyboard - hopefully doing Non-English language with this Virtual Keyboard will be supported and native.

The original blog post from which I took the above chart is from here. It talks about how any one at any age with learning and practice can become an Expert. A nice piece to read and think about.

About 18 months back I was surprised to find a convenient checking-in process done by Kingfisher (Yes, I know that this was the only item I am in praise of an airline other than my favourite Jet Airways). It is by what they call "Roving Agents" who are airline staff roaming around near the entrance and checking counters. If you just have a hand baggage they check you right there with the help of a PDA and print your boarding pass as well (with the printer connected to the hip belt). I noticed the PDA they use was a Windows CE based Symbol Technologies device, but I was interested in knowing the entire solution story.

In an article that came in CIO India Magazine's supplement "10 Studies in Innovation" I saw the article "Terminal Velocity" which described this solution in detail. The Roving Agent piggybacks on the Wi-fi infrastructure available at airports. Agents carry PDAs (MC-70 from Symbol Technologies) that run a client application connected to the host system. The PDA is also connected to a portable thermal printer (Cameo-3 from Zebra Technologies) via Bluetooth. Read the entire article here.

Agreed that this solution is less appealing now than 18 months before. With most of the airlines allowing you to print your boarding pass online itself it makes Roving Agents less compelling, but from a technology perspective this is a good case study.

In the recent months there has been good improvements in Virtual Earth's Birds eye view. One of the reasons this was possible was due to new camera used for these excellent high resolution images - Ultracamx. UltracamX is from a company (Vexcel) Microsoft acquired some time back. It supports very large image format available (216 megapixels: 14,430 pixels across track; 9,420 pixels along track) which means they do fewer flights to capture images. It has something like 13 CCD Arrays, each of them controlled by a dedicated CPU and instance of Windows CE Embedded and a 14th CPU for overall control.

In the corridors of Mix '08, Scott Hanselman (PM, Microsoft and Ex-Regional Director) got hold of me & my fellow Regional Director (Delhi) Vinod Unny for an Interview. The topic was on "Outsourcing" and how it affects both sides of the world - we enjoyed talking on this hotly debated topic, hear it out and post your comments below.

Full Interview: AAC Audiobook (iPod) | MP3 Full Show | WMA Full Show |WMA Low-Fi

Hanselminutes is a weekly audio talk show with noted web developer and technologist Scott Hanselman and hosted by Carl Franklin. Scott discusses utilities and tools, gives practical how-to advice, and discusses ASP.NET or Windows issues and workarounds.

Early this week Apple released their Safari browser for Windows. Safari is a neat, standards compliant web browser and I feel its arrival for Windows is definitely an important step. You might think the usefulness or the need for yet another browser. Look at it this way - with Web becoming ever more intervened with our lifes, innovation in the browser space is super critical. Personally, I love Internet Explorer and I think IE 8.0 will be a technically advanced browser with dominant market share, but still we cannot leave the fate of web to just two companies - Microsoft & Mozilla. Recently AOL closed for good Netscape, of course Netscape has in real terms died several years back itself. This leaves us with only one other credible competition which is from Opera but Opera never managed to garner any significant user base in the PC. So Apple coming in to this space should be welcomed.

While we welcome Apple, their entry has not been without controversies. Mozilla CEO John Lilly has taken serious objections to Apple offering the new browser to Windows users via Apple Software Update which is part of iTunes & QuickTime Player. This means several millions of iTunes & QuickTime Player users will without there knowledge get Safari, there by increasing the surface area of attacks on their PC. I agree 100% with the objections raised by Mozilla CEO on this that it undermines the trust users will have on software. Adding on to this, is Apple's licensing terms for Safari which permits you to install this only on "a single Apple-labeled computer at a time". This is weird considering Apple never makes or sells any Windows PC, so you will never get a legal way to install Safari. While  Register in UK and many in blogosphere are making fun of this, I guess this is more a goof-up and a human error (copy and paste problem) from Apple's legal team and sure to be corrected out in days.

Finally, when I tried to install Safari in Vista x64 I get the following file corrupt error. I tried downloading half-a-dozen times from IE, Firefox, FDM - same error. It installs fine in a Windows XP x86 machine. Seems Apple has some more work to do.

If your laptop like mine is part of a domain, then updates are likely to be controlled by your IT Team. In our office, our IT team uses WSUS to download the updates locally, test them on local machines and then approve the updates for general consumption across the organization. I am one of the few in the office to use Windows Vista, so these updates are approved at the last and I have to wait. More so, ultimate extras don't flow correctly through WSUS. Since they are controlled by WSUS, even if I am a local system administrator I cannot directly run Windows Update locally or go to Microsoft Update and get updates.

This week one of my IT Engineer gave me a tip. It was to login locally to the machine, using a local machine user name and then use Windows Update. I used it and it worked perfectly. Please be warned that doing updates this way, may not be supported by your IT Team!

At Vishwak we have over 10 years of experience with Media and Mobile Portal solutions. Recently we launched www.deliveranexperience.com as a branding site for our offerings with Silverlight, Sharepoint, VPF (Vishwak Portal Framework) and MCDS (Mobile Content Delivery System).

We are showcasing this for the first time in upcoming Digital Hollywood (Fall) event being held at Hollywood from 29th Oct to 1st Nov 2007. DH is a premium event that connects Hollywood and IT industries. I will be there and if you happen to be in LA area, please visit us at Stall #60 at the Grand Ballroom at Hollywood and Highlands.

I have been invited as well as a speaker in a panel discussion on Day 3 (Nov 1):

Track III: 12:50 PM - 2:00 PM - Personalized and Innovative Mobile & Broadband Services: Advertising and Content

• Steve Bava, Group Account Director, WHITTMANHART Interactive
• Mike Fitzsimmons, CEO, Delivery Agent
• Jonathan Cobb, Founder and CEO, Kiptronic
• Venkatarangan Thirumalai, Chairman, Vishwak Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
• Jordan Greene, VP of Mobile Marketing, MindMatics
• Dina Pradel, Vice President of Marketing, StyleFeeder
• Michael J. Pinto, Managing Principal, mCapital, LLC, Moderator

For Session Description & Speaker Bios Click Here

Update 1/Nov/07: My panel went well, Michael did a good job. Though the discussions were more on the advertisement/agency topics I presented an Indian perspective on some of the innovative products that are being launched in India.

As I have kept noting down in this blog, Microsoft's Live Service offerings are improving day by day. In the recent weeks there have been significant improvement in the search relevance, breadth of offerings and more so on the improved user interface. Today when I went to Live Search Maps, I liked the Single Text box Interface (shown above), the earlier two text boxes UI was a pain to use. What impressed me most was their support for business owners - I searched for "Vishwak Solutions" looking for our company in Redmond, WA. It didn't give up any results, then I clicked on the Help button expecting no useful information or out dated links. I was surprised to see the first topic itself being what I wanted - How to list my business?. The steps that followed was easy to complete and they verified real time with a PIN number by calling the business phone number I had furnished. Overall excellent consumer experience, keep up the good work Live team!

Cybermedia (Publishers of PCQuest and Dataquest) have a job's portal at Cybermedia Dice. Recently I was interviewed by their reporter Harshitha B Hegde, and here is the summary of the coverage:

"Vishwak Solutions is a decade-old company offering successful desktop and mobile portal solutions. T N C Venkata Rangan, the founder CEO of Vishwak, shares his views on the market growth and career prospects in portal development". Full Article (PDF) is published here.

I read in IEEE Spectrum July 2007, a detailed technical analysis of how a high profile mobile phone bugging that happened in 2004. It was of Greece Prime Minister, his cabinet colleagues in defense and foreign affairs, MPs and others. The interesting thing the authors (Vassilis Prevelakis, Diomidis Spinellis) point out was the fact the whole episode was undetected for several months. The hackers (till date even after a Greece Parliament Commission was not identified) had used very sophisticated techniques to hide traces of their activities and ensured they left no entries in any logs.

The cellphones of Greece PM and others were wiretapped to unauthorized numbers by hacking into Ericsson's AXE Switches used in Vodafone Greece mobile network and installing RootKit softwares. Ericsson switch software has the ability to patch its Operating System code without rebooting by using something called has Correction Area. The hackers installed about 29 blocks of code in this correction area, tampered all checksums to go undetected, modified (made itself hidden) the list of active processes in memory. The rogue software stored all the mobile numbers that has to be tapped in memory (there by avoiding any disk entries) and copied the voice calls to parallel numbers.

From a software best practice angle, what was interesting was this could have been identified much earlier if Vodafone had purchased a front-end (GUI) software called IMS (Interception Management System) that maintains a list of legal wiretapping numbers. This list could have been compared periodically with what was in memory and any differences between the two alerted immediately. In this case, the backend OS in the switch had legal wiretapping capabilities enabled and working, but the front-end to manage it was not purchased by customer. Clear case of not reducing the attack surface area by removing unwanted piece of software in live environments. 

This post is more of my thinking than a finite point on the present world economic achievements.

If you stop and think about what has been achieved in the last 10-15 years in Economy and Wealth Creation, it is amazing on any parameter you take. Whether it is China with a Trillion Dollar Foreign Exchange reserve, World's large corporation Market Cap (Google, Citi, WalMart) of each over several hundred Billion Dollars, Governments Trade Surpluses, Indian Government Direct Taxes Growth of over 60%, Worldwide sustained economic growth for last 5 years even though Oil is selling at record high of $70+ per barrel - on any account what has been achieved now is unprecedented in the modern history.   

There are several complex happenings that have enabled this including Globalization. Being an Engineer and Software person, I would like to think it is because of Computers and Internet revolution (When I say Computers I do include Mobile Phones as well). Think about any task in modern research/science, business, life, medicine, banking/finance - there is no task that is not influenced by Computers and Internet. 

It can range:

• From preparing a thesis for a PhD, where you can research papers from around the world (which would have been impossible to do  2 decades back at this cost and time)  and hence stand on other giants shoulders
• Exchange real-time data and do complex calculations for fundamental research including DNA analysis
• Access to best written courseware and training materials used for Education
• Access to world wide economic trends
• Learning from Management best practices and mistakes from around the world

and so on... In all these (and you can add hundreds of more items) Computers and Internet have touched and improved productivity at every facet of our present day life.

Do you have a say on this, leave your comments.

At Vishwak, we value the openness of WWW and importance of standards for our business; so we are members with W3C. Representing Vishwak, I am a member in the Advisory council in W3C. Yesterday, while browsing my profiles page in W3C site I came across two interesting items.

ForgeProofing: SPAM in email is a huge problem nowadays and this becomes worse if you are in a email group. W3C has added few interesting filters to prevent EMail Forgery. The way it works is by examining whether mail claiming to be sent from an email address matches a pattern that you have specified. If so, it is allowed through. If not, it is assumed to be a forgery and is rejected by our mail hubs. For example: Identify a pattern in the "From:" line of mail that you send. For example, suppose the From: line in email you send includes your full name and your email address. Or it can be a pattern identifying your email client software, indicated in the User-Agent Header. Though these techniques are not fool-proof they can certainly limit casual spammers.

FOAF: The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is about creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do. In short, FOAF is about your place in the Web. FOAF is a simple technology that makes it easier to share and use information about people and their activities (eg. photos, calendars, weblogs), to transfer information between Web sites, and to automatically extend, merge and re-use it online. You can access my FOAF here (it is a machine readable XML file).

One of the best way to keep in touch with the hundreds of technologies from Microsoft is to read the monthly MSDN Magazine. I have been a reader for more than a decade even when it was called MSJ. To get it in India it meant you paid prohibitive price for shipping, now all that is past.

You can now subscribe to the digital editions of MSDN Magazine and Dr. Dobbs Journal for FREE!. Please click here to subscribe. Go to here to see samples of the digital magazines.

In the 90's Microsoft was felt closed and distanced from customers, but in the last few years the company has become very transparent. This was through active blogging from thousands of softies - senior level to engineers; community engagements; product roadmap shared early and regular CTPs (Community Technology Preview) of all major releases including Visual Studio, Silverlight, SQL Server and more. I believe no other large software company (even the OSS) has been so transparent in the last few years.

In this article of PC World, the author argues that Apple is the new bully on the block, using strong arm tactics with partners. Do you agree, post your comments below.

Many times we find Google able to give appropriate answers when you are looking for something, especially with their built in calculator/formulae/conversion and other tools integrated in search. Today I wanted to know when was Deepavali (note the Tamil word I am using here instead of Hindi Diwali) this year. Without thinking much, I typed in IE 7 Search Box Deepavali 2007 and to my surprise I got the correct answer from Live Search. Check out the screen shot below. Google didn't understand what I wanted and gave me usual web links as results

Interestingly, Live Search seemed to know about most of the Indian Festivals including Pongal, Holi and others.  Impressive stuff by Microsoft, please keep it up.

In the fierce war on Search Engines this can be a new page - for all of you out there who are wondering what war, hasn't it been won by google I do believe it is not. Anyways, as the book "The Search" talks about how much can be known about you by Search Engine companies with your search behaviour/data. Accussing Google is doing this today and tracking everyone is rubbish, as it will take enormous processing power and no one has yet figured out a way to monetize that information for profit. But in the future this will become a possibility when computing power and data mining software become more sophisticated.

So online users worry about their privacy will become a genuine concern. I was happy to see a news today that Ask.com is planning to do something on this. They promise to protect your privacy by not storing information on your searches in their database with AskEraser (to be introduced by this year-end). If People like and flock to this feature, Google can implement the technology overnight - they have to stop doing their logging . But the challenge for Google is not Technology but business, because of the impact this will have on their advertisement business.

All said, privacy has every chance of becoming the next battle ground in search. It will be interesting to see any path-breaking innovation Google Engineers can come up with which protects Advt. revenue and privacy.

Till then, let us continue searching on the net as usual ...

I get this question from our customers most of the time, on what should be the ideal time for a WebPage to load that consumers will be bear with and will not switch to an other site. It is not an easy question to answer, as each webpage (and its site) is different, offers varied functionalities, delivers wide range of contents and each sites objective is different. In my opinion only a Search Engine (like Google) can have the simplest (smallest) homepage as it just needs to have one TextBox and still do something useful. For all other sites it is a careful orchestration (and comprimises) between features exposed, richness, content & speed.

On this same topic I read in Business Line an interview "Trends in the making" with Chris Schoettle (EVP, Akamai Technologies) and he sa:

"End users today expect a page to load faster. Average user satisfaction for a page to download is now four seconds. If it takes longer than that, they will typically go to another site. People do not have the patience to wait for pages to load. A couple of years ago, it was seven seconds. And soon, it will be no more than three seconds"

At Vishwak, few months back we collected data on time taken for page load of Google and Yahoo! for academic interest. We did this from various Indian metros both with Dial-up connections and from browsing centres (Broadband).

Disclaimer: This study was done purely for academic interest and we don't guarantee accuracy nor we will be responsible for any consequences of usage of this data. Yahoo! and Google are trademarks of their respective companies.

PCQuest Magazine in its June 2007 issue has listed 250 IT Implementation Projects in India. I am happy to say our Vishwak Portal Framework based solution we provided for Live Mint (Hindustan Times & WSJ Business paper) is featured as one of them. (Case study of LiveMint)

(Courtesy: PC Quest June 2007)

Also interesting is the article's observation that ASP.NET is the preferred platform of choice for Portals in India for its ease of use. Our VPF is based on ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005.

"Most of the portal solution projects that we received were developed using ASP.NET or VB .Net. We spoke to the project heads of these portals to find out why they chose this platform. The answer was simplicity. According to them, creating projects on ASP.NET is mush easier and requires less code to write"

Earlier it was expected by Industry pundits that Sun in their JavaOne conference this week, Sun and Adobe will announce a version of Flash with Java Runtime to combat Microsoft's Silverlight. But Instead Sun has gone alone with their announcement of JavaFx which promises to give a Scripting Runtime, access to Java VM, 2D Graphics and more.

Adobe with its Flash, Flex and Apollo is clearly the incumbent with over 98% of installed base of Flash runtime. For Microsoft Silverlight is a huge step forward in this space and they have the advantage of bringing on board day 1 - millions of existing .NET Developers to Silverlight. Sun looks more as a late comer to the party. I am yet to study in detail on JavaFx - so I will hold on from making any technical comparisons at this stage.

If you look historically, what is happening now is clearly a re-run of the Browser Wars (to be precise Browser Based Applications war) between Microsoft with ActiveX and Sun with Java Applets. In the first round Java Applets got a slight majority, but Sun as a company didn't cash on it. Sun and Netscape let Microsoft eat from their hands royally.

What was interesting was what happened later - Adobe (Macromedia) who never were in the platform business suddenly in the early 2000s became a dominant force with the ubiquitous of their Flash Player. Thanks to Microsoft who bundled Flash Runtime (probably without realizing how much reach it will have later) with every Windows/IE installation and there-by making Flash the de-facto plug-in. In the last few years, YouTube's of the world made Flash, a great Media Platform. Now Adobe wants to build on this huge advantage of Flash with Apollo and there-by make the Operating System (Windows) irrelevant - let us wait and see. Read here on what Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe has got to say on Microsoft's Silverlight. Interesting days ahead ...

Another entrant gaining ground in last few years is the camp of Web 2.0/Ajax with Google Map's and SalesForce's of the world trying to build everything with HTML/JavaScript. I have my doubts on the scalability of these Ajax solutions for serious business applications - even for simple effects the amount of lines of JavaScript and CSS you have to write is mind-boggling.

When I was writing this I was reminded of a presentation I made in 1997 titled "Building Browser based Applications (PPT)". Worth checking it out.
(The presentation is given as last edited on 22/11/1997 - My contacts and company logo are all out-dated)

Yesterday Hutch-Microsoft soft launched Mobile Search in their PlanetHutch Portal. PlanetHutch (www.planethutch.in) is a web portal accessible only by Hutch Mobile Subscribers in India who have a GPRS capable handset and Data Services enabled. Though Google-Airtel have announced a similar service, the Live Search from Microsoft is the first to market in India.

To quote from Jaspreet Bindra, MSN India Country Manager "What this means is that the default search bar on the Hutch WAP portal is branded Live. The service is both on-deck and off-deck search: If you type ‘Aishwarya’ the search results will give you Aishwarya related content (music, wallpapers, etc.) on the PlanetHutch portal, as well as Web search results for ‘Aishwarya’ "

So why am I writing this here, because I am proud that at Vishwak we worked with Microsoft in developing the backend content integration modules for this service. Vishwak is also the "Development and Operations Partner" for Microsoft in the PlanetHutch portal for last 4 years.  

Hindustan Times in content partnership with Wall Street Journal launched a new Business Paper in India "Mint" on Feb 1st. Designed by well-known newspaper designer Dr. Mario Garcia and edited by former Wall Street Journal deputy managing editor and European editor Raju Narisetti, the paper brings some fresh perspective in the Indian Business News area.

So why I am writing about it here?, because at Vishwak we developed the technology for the online edition "LiveMint.com" and it runs on our Vishwak Portal Framework (VPF).