At Vishwak, we have been working on Live.Com gadgets, Vista Gadgets and other mash-up technologies for quite some time. Out of this, I personally feel the Vista gadgets to have the most potential to be useful. Lot of people seem to understand its potential though a bit delayed - including BBC Radio in the Vista gadget that I talked about in my Mix '07 posts.

When we published to Live Gallery few of our experimental gadgets, we were really surprised by the number of downloads they made. The gadgets we published were Dictionary Gadget, Media Player Gadget, System Notify, CPU Meter, History on Today, Outlook Task and Radio Gadget. Out of this Dictionary and Media player have got over 9000 downloads and growing.

Few months back I was interviewed by DataQuest magazine (a popular IT Industry Magazine in India) reporter, on our Mobile and Portal Initiatives at Vishwak. The interview got published in their April Issue. Interactions with Press is an interesting oppurtunity but at the same time a stressful one. It is an oppurtunity for good marketing and publicity, but it is stressful because you can't afford to have your tongue slip even a bit. Having said that if you play it too cautious and textbook fashion, then the reporter gets bored and you are un interesting as a news item. So you got to walk a fine line, for this I admire the industry stelwards who keep meeting press everyday.

A brief from the Interview: TNC Venkata Rangan, CMD, Vishwak says, "Primarily we are into portal management. We provide solutions to both desktop and mobile environments. Our portal framework is a valuable tool that provides a single point access to information resources and services."

Read the full article - DataQuest Online, Print Copy (PDF format)

Yesterday was a big day for me and for the entire team at Vishwak. We had completed 10 Years in Business as on 1st April 2007. We had a big dinner to celebrate this on 10 May 2007 at Courtyard Marriott, Chennai. We were joined by many of our customers on this happy occassion - including Microsoft India, Hindustan Times, Hutchinson Essar, Bharat Matrimony, ChennaiOnline, K7 Computing, Wipro and others. Mr.Jaspreet Bindra (Country Manager India, MSN & Windows Live) was the Chief Guest.

We had many enjoyable programs in the dinner, but the one I treasured most was when we had the 10th Anniversary cake cut by Vishwakians (shown in the photo below) who had been with us for more than 5 years. In this time of great volatility in Indian IT job market - we are lucky to have these dedicated individuals powering "Vishwak" for 5 years+.

Since it was celebration time, few of us spoke and that too briefly. In my speech, I touched on How did I decide to start Vishwak, what does the name mean and what I enjoy in running Vishwak?. 

See the entire photo album here | Video of the event here.

The US Patent Office has already granted 150 yoga-related copyrights and 2,315 yoga trademarks.

Indian Government normally reacts too late in protecting against Patents being awarded in Western world for age old Indian traditional practices. In an unexpected sense of urgency it seems to be acting now on Protecting several Yoga techniques from being patented.

"The Indian government is getting old Sanskrit and Tamil texts translated and is also cataloguing ayurvedic medicines. The information will be made available in five languages so patent offices around the world can access it, according to the International Herald Tribune"

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)

Since I blog on my own website I don't visit my Windows Live Spaces*  that often. When I logged in today by chance, I was surprised to see the amount of improvements that has happened there - including the number of gadgets, customization options, layout and the growing feature list. I only wish they make it more easy for novices - by making things simpler and less of a clutter.

I liked the What's new feature, which shows when the blogs of my contacts got updated. The best part is it automatically picked my contacts from my Messenger list - which is a good approximation of people I know personally and whose blogs I will be interested to track closely.

* I wanted to say My Spaces, but that might mean a different website than the one I am referring!

1. If I like it, it's mine
2. If it's in my hand, it's mine
3. If I can take it from you, it's mine
4. If I had it a while ago, it's still mine
5. If it's mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way
6. If I'm doing or building something, all the pieces are mine
7. If if looks like mine, it is mine
8. If I see it first, it's mine
9. If you are playing with something and you put it down, it automatically becomes mine
10. If it's broken, it's yours.

The above list has been shamelessly copy-pasted from Shonalee's blog. As a parent to a toddler myself I enjoyed the original post and thinking on how true it was !

Last time when I was in Singapore I bought a cordless phone that double's up as a VoIP/Skype Phone as well. This is the new Philips VoIP321 that allows you to connect normal POT (Plain Old Telephone / RJ11) and a USB cable that connects to your PC. If you are logged in your PC and to Skype software, then you can use the cordless phone as a Skype Headset as well. It is so well designed that my grandpa can use it easily, all you do is press the S (Skype) button on left-bottom, select the name of the contact, press dial to call them. Simple!.

The voice quality is amazing. Good buy.

Read the FAQ here and the Vista Driver download from here.

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.