Few years back when I read a book about Tatas I realized that we know little about Indian Achievers, I got interested in reading more such books.

Recently I bought from Landmark a book titled Vikram Sarabhai "A Life" by Amrita Shah. Before reading it, I knew little about Dr.Vikram Sarabhai other than he was a popular scientist and father of Indian Space Program that too by reading about him in Dr.A.B.J.Abdul Kalams' Wings of Fire book. As the book says I too had vague remembrance of him and confused his achievements with Dr.Homi Bhabha - the father of Indian Nuclear program. Please don't ask what happened to reading about these people in my School days, I honestly remember nothing of that   

The first thing that struck me while I started the book, the short life the man has lived (1919-71) and within that 50 years of life the amazing number of things he has achieved. He has founded numerous organizations - ISRO, IIM-Ahmedabad, ATIRA (Textile Research), PRL apart from running successfully his family business Sarabhai Chemicals and other business houses. He was also a successful scientist with many papers and a PhD on Cosmic Rays.

What a life this man has lived, which every Indian has to be proud of!

A must read book for people interested - but this book is not a complete biography, skips on his college days and the author Amrita Shah has put together pieces from her own research, what she heard from others and joining the dots on what could have been Dr.Sarabhai's thinking at various points.

The first session I was in a SilverLight with .NET framework session that was interesting. The ability to use Scriptable attribute in .net to expose a function from .NET and have it called in JavaScript or respond to a JavaScript event in browser was cool and opens great possibilities in client side coding. They have also exposed HTML DOM inside the .NET code.  

Next I went to a  Session by Don Box - pretty much everything went over my head, partly due to the reason I went in after 15 minutes of the talk starting.

For the last session of Mix '07 I decided to go MS Dynamic CRM Live Platform, since this was a new area for me. Ben Riga (Tech Evangelist, Microsoft) and Jason Hunt (CTO InvokeSystems) talked about using this to build a Pet Insurance site. They talked on:

• CRM in its whole sense means the complete Sales, Service & Marketing.
• Dynamics CRM has ability to customize data models or extend the existing data models and building relationships between entities
• It is entirely role based model. You can change the meta-data of an entity it can be published and live immediately, no need to restart
• The underlying CRM systems existing forms can be easily customized - both client and server side

In end of Day 2 of Mix '07 there was this keynote by Robbie Bach - President, Entertainment & Mobile Division Microsoft. He highlighted on the following:

• Connected Entertainment is all about Personal, Interactive & Social
• He talked about how to Attract, Engage and Excite to do a sale with your customer
• XBox has over 10 Million Boxes sold, XBox Live has over 6 million users - primarily because they want to socialize.
• Windows Media PCs are over 30 Million out there
• He showed some cool demos like
• On how Burger King decided to build 3 specific branded games on XBox and sold it for $3.99 over 3 Million copies. This helped their brand to available for a longer immersive fashion for the young target audience
• With Microsoft aquiring "Massive In-Game Ads" they now have over 100 titles with over 60 Advertisers
• DisneyLand HongKong which wanted to target the Main land online users make them aware of Disney as a brand, went to partenr with OEMs in China to pre-install Vista Gadgets (which saves download over broad-band) that provides various options - trailers, games, etc.
• 
• Microsoft themselves say the power of community in a TV Advertisement on "Gears on War" game they posted in XBox Live. It was a violent action video with a melody as background music. Immediately they saw about 700 different (mash-up) versions of it in YouTube and other video sites, downloaded over 5 Million times and the game got sold 4 Million copies or so.
• BBC Radio One talked about their Windows Live Messenger Activity for listening Radio together and social network website. 

Panel Discussion - Marketing is Dead, Long Live Marketing

Andrew Rashbass (Publisher and MD of The Economist, a magazine I love) said: 92% of Internet users find context sensitive adverising today is intrusive and if they can they will turn them off. The thumb rule is to sell to 8% of users, you are turning off 92% of users. Market Forces will make many of the traditional media companies to die due to drying up of Advertising money for them, the advertising money is there but not enough for everyone, it is good because it is due to Market forces. Though 30 seconds pre-roll is bad, but since all marketing forces are piling on so it is not available enough. Robbie who talked before now on Marketing was attended by 2000 people, but is losing 300 Million Dollars last year . There is always a lean-forward media (Internet), lean-back media (TV) dilemma. I am not sure whether you will get full convergence or whether there will be room for both - may be yes.

In a question on whether they are worried on monopoly in Internet - Andrew said certainly not, google is an example of a good product and market forces, and despite their market penetration there is still tons of choices. The Host in turn added that one new startup gets founded in Silicon Valley every 48 hours now.

In a question on whether the new Portable Reader Devices will replace paper. Andrew said it will not happen in short-term, not in mid-term and definitely not in long-term. Andrew said nothing kills a bad product than over advertising. We can keep of wishing, but nobody is taking. We have the perfect central park, in the bed, in the toilet, in the bath - that is paper. The host added that Bill Gates believes that in the long-term when Devices are portable and foldable it will replace. Andrew countered that BillG can use it, but no one else will use it.

In a question on Bad Ads appearing all the time, Andrew said The best way to reach wide is to interupt and be disruptive and web has made it more interruptive.

Carol Kruse (Group Director, Coca-Cola) said we have killed email due to SPAM, Online is now happening but everyone is promising Mobile will be big. But no one has figured out how to do advertising non-intrusive in your mobile phones - who wants to see Ads in your personal phones?. 30 Seconds Pre-Roll before online videos is bad for consumers.

Winston Binch (Executive Producer, Crispin Porter) said magazine reading is increasing, brochures in-take have increased because you can flip through it and we grew with it. We will have lot of overlaps and interesting campaigns using together.

Jonathan Hsia (Associate Marketing Director, Starcom) in a reply to a question said that Bad Ads like in mySpace appear all the time, SPAM works somehow, but when our customers see a bad ads, they come back.

I have seen ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit in its beta builds. After its release, I haven't checked it recently. Today in Mix '07 I got a chance to sit in a demo session on that. They have added pretty impressive list of reusable controls like the SlideShow, Animation, etc. They all work using JavaScript and on a wide range of browsers. Microsoft have also open-sourced it for community development in CodePlex.

In the Web Services Buy or build Panel - discussions where on how Smugmug.com uses Amazon's S3 Storage instead of building their data center for redundant storage. How Redfin.com uses Live Virtual Earth instead of their own map implementation.

There was a cool session on WPF by my fellow RD - Scott Stanfield demoing on Seeing Dead People, check it out. Scott was fantastic, don't miss the recordings. He demoed Charles Petzold's XAML Cruncher tool from Petzold's book which is the best reference book on WPF apart from Nathan's book. He showed how you can import an Adobe Illustrator vector into Expression Designer and do fancy stuffs with that. They spent like 2500 hours totally on this & 3 Designers full time. Lessons learned: In the initial version they stored all data in code then they moved it to all resource files, all the family tree data was in a binary serialization then they moved to XML Serialization so that hierarchies and nestings can be handled better, initally they did XAML by hand then moved to Expression Blend. Scott also demoed a cool Game build as a XAML Browser App (XBAP)

The session on Silverlight media integration by Mike Harsh covered the following:

• Everything about WIndows Media Tools continue to work
• Showed how easy it is to build a simple Media Player with Silverlight
• Demoed a fantastic player showing 6 to 8 live broadcast playing from Internet, switching, full-screen, etc.  
• Silverlight supports WMV 7,8, 9 / VC-1, WMA, MP3 and the runtime has everything that is needed to play including decoders, etc.
• Showed how Expression Media Encoder can convert media files and output cool media player experience without coding

In Day 2 of Mix '07 Brian Arbogast announced new Windows Live API which are now easy to use, simpler licensing and ready to go. Microsoft is certainly late to the game, but can they pull it off from behind this time, let us wait and see.

(My photo with Brian Arbogast here has nothing to do
with Mix '07 - it was taken on 22/Oct/2004 in Gurgaon)

• Videos Support - SilverLight Streaming
• Spaces Photos - Currently Read-only, soon to be Write-Read
• Windows Live Contacts - Access to Hotmail
• Virtual Earth Maps
• Add Live Search to your site

They are introducing a new concept - User Controlled Privacy Model. By this Users can limit access of their data to a particular domain. I think this is good from a business and long-term sustainability stand-point.

All the services are free up to a limit and then a predictable annual charge.

There were demos about a mashup by Microsoft on blog and Virtual Earth and by Match.com using Windows Live APIs. I was surprised to learn about the scale of Match.com is responsible for 10% of all marriages that happen in USA, 60K customers every day, 55 Million emails every month. It was interesting they are also an 100% Microsoft Shop (IIS/SQL Server/.NET) and push a giga-bit of traffic every second. Their mash-up with Live Search especially the anonymous Messenger Chat using Live Alerts was cool (see the second image below).

The keynote today in Mix '07 at Las Vegas was fantastic. Microsoft unravelled a ton of new technologies around their SilverLight runtime in the keynote by Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie. There are tons of information about these in Visitmix.com website, so I will just cover the bullet points and what impressed me personally.

1. SilverLight 1.0 Beta is released, this is around a 1MB download that renders XAML files, can be programmed with JavaScript and you have a "Go-Live" license for this. This plugin works in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Apple Safari. I missed the Linux desktop support and so did few others who participated in a Panel Discussion on Open Source Interop session - but there is no word from Microsoft on whether Linux support is happening or not.
2. This is the most awesome announcement. SilverLight 1.1 (currently in Alpha) Plugin will include an almost full .NET Framework runtime including support for dynamic languages like Ruby and Python.
3. SilverLight Streaming - An oneline video sharing service from Microsoft. And the Expression Media Encoder to go with it.
4. Simpler licensing and opening up of API of Windows Live Services

My personal take on SilverLight is this. I am super excited on the .NET Framework support. And at Vishwak we have been playing with it in its previous name "WPF/E" and I think this is a very promising technology, but the success for it against competition like Adobe Flash/Apollo depends on how large can Microsoft get its installed base quickly. It is a chicken and egg problem, but unless there is sufficient installed base, it will be difficult to get customers on board quickly.

There has been also announcements about IIS 7.0 Beta Go-Live recently.

References

Tim Sneath in his blog has listed great Silverlight webcasts that are great to quick start learning. He has also listed a great WPF Demo.

Scott Hanselman (my fellow RD) has posted this great entry on today's annoucement on Silverlight and .NET Support.

Silverlight FAQ | Quickstarts | Learning Video | Scott Guthrie talking on Silverlight | Videos running parallel in a puzzle

Update 21/June/2007: Came across thisgood posting from Scott Guthrie on various demos with SilverLightt

I am excited to be here. Just now completed my registration for Mix '07 in Venetian Convention Center, here in Las Vegas. Collected my free copies of Vista Ultimate and Expression Studio. The atmosphere here seems to be more fun and informative than last year. If you at home you can watch the keynotes live from Visitmix.com. I will keep you posted on things I found interesting. Stay tuned. And if you are attending Mix, remember to say "hello" to me.

Sometime back I had posted about President ABJ Abdul Kalam's recommending to give Bandwidth free just like how Governments today provide basic Road Infrastructure free. I didn't expect Government and Politicians to take note of this. Surprise!

The suggestion seems to be noticed and government of india is planning to give broadband free by 2009. This is certainly a very welcome move and when it happens will certainly give a big boost to economy.

On my flight from London to Seattle, I watched the recent James Bond 007 movie - Casino Royale. Daniel Craig has acted well and is looking good as the new bond. But the movie was unlike any previous Bond movie I have seen - pretty boring for a Bond movie. No new gadgets, car chases - it was more physical fights and chases like an Indian Movie.     

Today I started from Chennai to USA, enroute London (that's where I am doing this post after paying GBP 10 for 24 Hrs T-Mobile Wi-Fi) by British Airways. Like I have said in my past posts, almost all my Non-Tamil Movie watching happens while in long distance flights like these. Today I got a Upgrade to Business Class and could enjoy to a private selection of movies in the BA flight. While the first 7 hours of flight I slept, the last two hours I caught up with some movie watching.

The movie was about the Late Uganda Military Ruler Idi Amin and the friendship with a young Scotland doctor who comes to Uganda to help in a NGO. The doctor initially reluctant to take the President's Physician job, then get lured by the benefits and status it provides and soon becomes Amin's trusted advisor - little did he know that closeness to power centre's are always a double-edged sword. The movie depicts the doctor's emotional dilemma between his Western Principals and friendship with the President. It doesn't attempt to be an historic record of all events of Idi Amin's rule. Nice to watch.

While in the terminal I came to an Italian Coffee Shop "Costa" for a cup of tea. But look below at their monstorous cup given for GBP 1.5. The cup was much bigger than a regular soup bowl, so I had to definitely take a snap of it!

(I have kept my Nokia 9500 next to the cup for size comparison)

Internet has fundamantely changed the way people get free (as in freedom) access information and news. Before Internet, governments around the world could stop control access to their individual benefits. But with Internet it all changed, even in countries with protective regimes you can access Internet freely to a large extend. Many governments around the world tried to block sites and failed to a large extend. I personally believe other than Terrorist and Illegal sites, there should be no ban on any other sites. In the long run it is good for people in power too, to allow free flow of information.  

I wanted to do this post on seeing a news article today in MSN India that "Indian IT ministry refuses to ban websites". Sensible move. What ever is the reasoning behind this, I think this validates the power of Indian Democracy and freedom of speech here.