This is one of my usual rants after a trip to USA. Early this month I left to US for a business trip which included Mix '08 conference in Las Vegas (my third in a row). I normally fly BA from Chennai straight to West coast because it is the shortest and has minimum stopovers (or) fly with Singapore/Malaysian Airlines due to their service and food. This time I decided to fly with my favourite Airline - Jet Airways as they fly to US now and I also got a good deal for Business class (Jet calls it Premium class) at Rs.190,000 ($4750) roundtrip with taxes (Chennai to Newark (EWR) via Brussels & back).

Onward

The first experience was in Chennai Airport (which used to be my airport of choice in India) where it was total chaos from entering till boarding, may be because it was a Friday and there were at least 8 to 10 flights taking off within a few hours window. You normally see Jet Airways friendly staff everywhere for domestic sectors, surprisingly there were not even one outside the counters and the counters too were thinly staffed for this international sector which was running full as well.

The minute you boarded the experience starts to be a different one and the in-flight service for which Jet is famous for was excellent. I got an absolute flat-bed (which the air hostesses makes it for you on request), big flat screen for entertainment, night-suit & a designer personal hygiene kit. Each seat in Premiere also provides you with USB Port for charging and 110V AC Socket for charging. Two things Jet can improve on the in-flight experience, one increase the selection of food (like Malaysian they can do a buffet on wheels) and the second to improve the number of regional language (Tamil) & comedy video content.

Jet flies 3 flights currently from India (Mumbai, Delhi & Chennai) which arrive in Brussels one after other in say 10 minutes gap of each. And they take off to 3 destinations in North America (Toronto, New York JFK, Newark EWR) in 10 minutes gap of each. So you have a good hub and spokes model for choice here. When you land in Brussels, there are hardly any ground staff from Jet to guide you to the lounge or for other assistance. The good thing is that in Brussels Airport, Jet Airways has a well-equipped lounge on their own with a good spread of breakfast selections.

When you land in USA (Newark EWR) the lack of ground staff from Jet Airways continues. Even though I was flying Business, my bags took more than 45 minutes to arrive in the belt and no one to help you on that. Since I had to go to the West Coast (San Jose and then to Vegas) I decided to spend the day in New York with one of my early mentors and good friend Mr.Shivraj who is an independent IT Consultant there.

Return

For return I started from Seattle flying to Newark (EWR) by Alaska. Since Alaska doesn't have a baggage alliance with Jet Airways yet, I couldn't do through check-in, which means I have to get the bags and check in again manually in Newark. And once I arrived in Newark there was hardly any signs or directions to which terminal other airlines are flying from. The good thing, the airport had information staffs everywhere who guide you correctly. I went to AirTrain counters where they guided me to Terminal B (That's from where Jet Operates). I went to the Northwest lounge offered by Jet Airways (for which you have to go to a separate gate and security check) and found they carry nothing other than liquor and orange juice, absolutely nothing to eat. So I came out and had the only good vegetarian item I could find (Pizzas) in the gate. The return journey was more pleasant at Brussels, with Jet Airways ground staff taking good care of passengers, guiding them to lounge, etc. The Jet lounge at Brussels didn't have a shower but they arranged for one at the near-by Diamond Lounge on their own free.

US Airports and Carriers

Compared to other full-service airlines in USA, I found Alaska to be more on time, efficient and cordial service. One thing I don't understand is why do they want to charge for the Entertainment (Digi Players) and for the measly food they serve on board. United, Alaska and all other carriers in US, charge you like $5 or $10 for a frozen food packet and for Entertainment screen. This is the same procedure even on flights over 4 hours like the one I took now from Seattle to Newark or the earlier one I took from Newark to San Jose which was like 6 hours. They charge like $250 or more for coast to coast and they still want to charge $10 more , it is not that I am complaining about the additional charge it is the lack of good choice in food. I see all the flights I travelled in this trip were running full and I read that they are making good profits for the last 12 to 18 months. Still all the flights you travel with US carriers are old and aging, which I can understand because many of them after 9/11 are still in bankruptcy protection or just out.  What I don't understand is the lack of service mostly in-flight (I certainly don't believe it to be racism), complete in-difference to paying customers which you don't see anywhere in Asia. For example, in the Alaska flight today they missed for several seats serving juices & snacks. When I asked (so too few other customers) she just brought her own selection and that was it. I was offered an Orange Juice, when I asked her that I actually want a Tomato Juice, she just ignored it (I am sure I was very clear) banged the cup and left.

One of the things you will find it clear once you have been through few US airports is that they have a total lack of infrastructure and space for security screening. Almost all the airports are old and aging, when they were planned there was no concept of passenger screening so it all happens in long lines in cramped corridors. 

On my flight from India to US two weeks back, I watched Chak De! in Jet Airways In-Flight Entertainment. Irony is that I have the DVD of the movie purchased and lying idle in my house for months now.

The movie is a great attempt and a much-needed one to highlight the neglect of all other sports in India other than Cricket that too on Women Hockey. Other than track games and recently tennis, women sports have been for long least appreciated in the country. This movie where SRK acts in the role of a wrongly corruption tainted coach who desperately fights in getting the girls ready and there by clean his records. Very well done movie, must see.

In the USA, RV means Recreational Vehicle which basically is a motor home where you live for brief periods during vacation.

I saw the movie "RV" with my wife about a month or two back, in TV. This movie acted by Robin Williams (Bob Munro) is about Bob hiring a RV to take the family on vacation and he is not familiar with using RV and gets into lot of funny situations. Not a great movie, but certainly a clean fun movie that can be watched with family & kids.

Yesterday I saw "The Brave One". The story is simple - A Radioshow artist Erica Bain (played by Jodie Foster) and her boyfriend are attacked by mobs in New York Central Park with the boyfriend getting killed. Erica recovers and tries to get her life back, feel unsecure and gets a gun illegally for self-protection. She then goes on to doing few killings of bad guys and finally takes revenge on the killers of her boyfriend. The story line reminded me two Tamil Movies  (Superstart Rajnikanth in Naan Maahan Illai & Naan Sigappu Manithan) released around 1984/1985. In "The Brave One"  Terrence Howard plays a role of Police Detective Mercer which reminds the same role played by Director K.Bhagyaraj. 

Zumobi is a new free mobile widget application that's from a company spawned from Microsoft Research. They did the whole presentation in Expression and didn't use Powerpoint

• The Zumobi application was for organizing content in a easy to find, attractive format mostly in 4 x 4 grids.
• Zumboi uses XML & JS for building the widgets
• The SDK and Emulator are free to download and use along with Runtime
• They don't use a Windows Emulator but a Zumboi runtime which runs in the PC to give a full experience
• The differences between platforms (J2ME, Windows Mobile, Palm) on Scripting, Display, etc are all abstracted by Zumobi Runtime

I was in the talk by Eric Picard (Director, advertising technology strategy at Microsoft) on the future of advertising. It started with how much potential there is to optimize and automate the advertisement buying/selling process in the industry and just for online, but for TV, Print and other media. Eric talked about how the future systems will be more open, interconnected and automated. He touched upon the future where disposable surfaces for video, OLED and more will come, also with the Nano technology how battery life with be extended and revolutionized.

Eric pointed out to a video on the Internet showing Nokia's concept technology using Nano technology, cool video check it out below:

Scott Dickens of Microsoft presented on "Cross-Browser Layout with Internet Explorer 8".

• Main action item is to check and ensure your sites work on Internet Explorer 8.0 since it will be standards compliant by default
• It is a good decision Microsoft has taken now by making IE 8 default to strict standards mode, you need to over-ride it for IE 7 mode. This can be done by having in your pages a meta tag <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />. You can also do this at the entire site level by including in IIS Header tag which can be overwritten at page level as well
• IE 8 includes great Typographic foundation
• A new layout engine was built with CSS 2.1 spec in hand, Deprecation of hasLayout
• When there are ambiguities in the CSS spec, the idea is to check with working group, see what other browsers are doing

More features on readiness can be seen here and a complete coverage on IE 8 can be read from IE blog.

Members in the panel where: 

1. Don Dodge - Microsoft
2. Kimbal Musk - CEO, Me.dium
3. Robert Scoble - Fast Company
4. Dave McClure - 500 Hats
5. Kevin Rose - Founder, Digg
6. Ryan McIntyre - Foundry Group (Representing Venture Capital in the panel)

• Social networks today don't make much money, and that is very crucial for Myspace and Facebook on how to make money for themselves and help their ecosystem in making money
• Remora model (A small fish latching on to a big fish to swim) of revenue. An example was Photobucket depending on Myspace and then Myspace cutting them out
• Digg has a revenue deal with Microsoft's Advertising deal. Digg is making money from people who are submitting, how do they feel?. Digg feels it is not work that their users are doing, if it is work users will not come again. It is because users care to share. Digg is working on making it easy to share with friends by enabling submission on the homepage, all with a single-click no need to visit Digg pages at all
• Excite when started spent few million dollars for basic servers alone which were needed to crawl few million sites and the RAM alone was like $70,000
• The VC companies will find it difficult to find companies where they can invest less and make 5 to 10 times revenue. Most People are not doing the maths right, so ,if a VC is investing $25 Million then they are looking at exists at $100 to $200 Million levels. There are few acquiring possibilities at these levels
• Don't focus on the run of the mill CPM rates, instead go for the niche audience where you can charge premium like a magazine model
• There was a great question on "Why Web 2.0 revenue opportunities are being explored by startups only with USA market and not open to Europe. There is no recession in Europe, still why no monetization efforts outside USA"
• Me.dium had to launch the beta with $0.5 Million investments mainly on hardware alone. Me.dium's long term goal is to get the real nuggets out of the click thru' data to understand and identify important activities. Google has solved 1% of this problem of what you are intending to do and that itself is working out to several billion dollars
• Web 2.0 is a loss leader for something, nobody knows for what yet
• Me.dium when they launched were scared about privacy because they asked users to give all information that they can give about usage. Robert Scoble says "Privacy is dead"
• For every niche service that will cost $10 or less per month you can start to charge, there is good chances people will pay. Here again you will not get 100% conversion, but you need to give initial service free for users to taste the service and then look for some percentage conversion as paid users
• One of the research shows that 3% of your free audience will maximum convert to paid

I had a question to panel on how all this all affects "Mobile" but I didn't an answer for it

Ed Maia from Microsoft made this presentation on Silverlight 2.0 

• In Silverlight Media is a first class citizen
• In Silverlight 1, you needed to use Javascript in browser as the programming model, now in Silverlight 2 there is managed code as an additional programming model
• Silverlight 2 supports WMV 10 Pro Audio Codec in addition to other codecs supported in SL 1.0
• IIS 7 Media Pack allows bit rate throttle to save cost and also supports Web Playlists (so user cannot ask for the 4th file without watching 3,2,1) in ASX format
• Combining with markers from Expression Encoder you can set up markers. So that the first few seconds of video gets downloaded at full speed, then it only leads by few seconds as configured
• Playready for Silverlight 2 is a client and server side components for DRM. There is a client side additional downloaded that is needed for more DRM support
• Silverlight 2 supports only online DRM protected content, meaning everytime there is a DRM protected content then it goes online to License Server

Angus Logan, Sr. Technical Product Manager from Windows Live platform presented on:

• 400 million live ID users, 1bn authentications / day
• All services of Windows Live free upto 1 million users / month
• Today you have to go login.live.com to sign in, you can customize the page for select msn/microsoft sites only. Later 3rd party sites will be allowed to do this
• Windows Live tools for Visual Studio makes it super easy to implement Live Platform
• Windows Live you can associate with your local user/password store
• You can share your Windows Live Contacts Ids safely and under control to the sites you want to
• Increased Silverlight streaming hosting capacity for free
• ADO.NET Data Services (aka Astoria) which consumes AtomPub service end points for Application Base Storage, Photo API, LINQ to cloud capabilities
• Check out the new version of dev.live.com for new 7 Quick-Apps which are open source that are end to end scenarios.

Chris Wilson from IE talked about the new features.

• Beta1 is all about developer and web authors features, getting the platform ready. A later beta will have user experience improvements
• Predictable Experience for Users:
  • Domain Name is Highlighted in Address bar
  • Improved Manage Add-Ons Experience
  • Improved ActiveX: Per User ActiveX Install without admin, Per Site ActiveX Controls, DEP/NX code execution prevention
  • Users Sites & Applications must continue to work with a new browser
• Improved User Productivity
  • IE 8 is resilient after crashes - the frame continues to run, only the tabs gets reloaded
  • Support unlocking the web with W3C ARIA
  • Improved Zoom capability (Page layout is preserved)
  • Everyone uses lots of web services and it is manual.For this there is Activities now. It is implemented with OpenService. As a service provider you can check for your service being installed, if not prompt for install. (ie8.ebay.com has a sample)
  • Portions of a page is important, that's where Webslices comes. (ie8.ebay.com has a sample). It uses the Windows Feed infrastructure to keep it refreshed.
  • Complete CSS 2.1 Compliance
    • Generated Content and Counters
    • New 'display' values for tables
    • Outlines
    • CSS 3 Box-Sizing Property
    • CSS 3 Vertical Text
    • Unbiased CSS Test suites
• All IE8 CSS/JS have a debugger in the box.
• Most of the performance problems were Network Perf is frequently the problem
  • In Broadband the parallel connection limit increased to Six from two
  • JScript improvements
  • CSS Selector API
• HTML 5.0 Offline storage, offline/online events

Beta 1 is available from here | Complete coverage on IE 8 can be read from IE blog.

Ray Ozzie

There has been lot of releases in the last one year and then Yahoo!... There is a wide range of product + services that will come from Incubation to release from Microsoft including IE 8.0. Microsoft might seem to be doing random releases, so I will give a background on how they are all tied together - first is Advertisement as a revenue engine, second Internet reshaping Microsoft products and Services. Right from day one Internet has been about Content + Community + Commerce which are all innovative & greater user engagement models.

Three principles:

1. Web is the hub of social, device mash, networking. The concept of one PC is gone, the new world will be a collection of PCs connected by cloud. Your own device mash.
2. Enterprise, virtualization and commodity hardware (storage grid, computing grid). Utility computing model. All Microsoft software will be refactored for symmetry from enterprise to partner hosted models.
3. For Developers & Designers, we need to join small pieces to make big items. Loosely coupled composition and cooperated of pieces. Transparency and open standards are important.

Half a Million people worldwide are using Office Live & Dynamics CRMS Live. We also released last Monday, options to run Exchange, Sharepoint, OCS on the cloud. We are also announcing SQL Services Data Services today.

Internet Explorer 8.0

• CSS 2.1 will have the biggest impact so went for CSS certifications. We have contributed 702 test cases to W3C CSS Test working group in BSD license so that everyone can have the same test cases.
• Performance has been improved over 2.5 times
• HTML 5.0 support enables Ajax functions to understand browser back button, support Network Connection event, store data locally
• Rich Debugging and Developer tools integrated in the browser
• Activities are in place. They work on OpenService Specification
• WebSlice (which slices the page and allows me to monitor them and get alerted on changes) specifications under Creative Common License
• Internet Explorer 8.0 Beta 1 released

Silverlight

• 1.5+ Million installations per day are installed now
• Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 available for download
• Adaptive Streaming for automatically choose speed of delivery based on network and your CPU. You can plugin any algorithm for this
• IIS 7.0 Media Pack can help you to serve only 10% (or any other figure) from the point user is watching now with bandwidth throttling
• John Harris from Expression team showed: Silverlight Advertisement Template makes it easy doing advertisements with Silverlight, Atlas AdManager was shown, IIS 7.0 Media Pack allows Media Playlists which allows you to control how something is skipped or not, Expression Encoder 2.0 allows you to overlay advertisements with text, XAML or Video
• Ari Paparo VP from DoubleClick talked about how they are supporting Silverlight Overlay ads.
• Perkins Miller from NBC Sports & Olympics showed for the first time the product. We have 150 days to go. We are going to be putting 2200 hours live.
• Beta 1 of Silverlight 2.0 is about 4MB download. Partnering with Novell to release this in Linux. And lot of new controls are released
• AOL showed their new mail client with Silverlight
• MS Announced Sharepoint webparts for embedding Silverpoint
• Demoed Silverlight for Windows Mobile 6.0 and promised to bring it out on mobile devices that have a SDK
• Nokia will deliver Silverlight on Symbian S60 (which is a big win for Silverlight against Adobe Flash in my opinion) first then with S40 phones & Internet tables. Demoed it working in Nokia N95 by WeatherBug

In my earlier post I have given my guess list. My list was correct by more than 3/4th.

What happened from my list:

• FM had done nothing for Dollar hit export industry including IT
• Increase in Defence spending
• Dividend tax was tweaked
• Income tax exemptions increased by good percentages
• 6th Pay commission was accepted
• Farm credits /benefits were announced

What didn't happen from my list:

• Service tax rates were not changed (Good)
• A new committee for simplification didn't happen (Good, we have had enough committees)

The points I liked about the budget:

• Promised allocation for Minimum Work / Employment schemes
• Pushing the states for more accountability on central funded projects
• Drinking water availability in all villages and in all schools in India
• Allocation of over Rs.200 Crores for Chennai's Desalination plant
• Service tax for Customized Software (though I don't like the tax, it at least put an end to all arbitration on whether it is applicable or not)
• No change in corporate tax rate (Good)