Google comes up with so many innovative as well as user friendly ideas at reasonable price. When compared to Lotus notes or Microsoft Exchange, Google Apps provides tools at a very low price. Services provided by Google App engine makes it easier for an employee  to work smoothly and efficiently. What makes Google Apps special ?? . Answer to that question will be ” Google gives good quality services to any person or organization at affordable cost “.

Google Apps provides many services. Among them the most widely used and appreciated tools include

• GMail: Run your business, not your server
• Google Docs: Manage meetings online with Google calendar
• Google Calendar: Online docs with real time collaboration
• Google Sites: Create dynamic web pages in an easy way as creating a document
• Google Talk: Make calls and get your chat on
• Google Videos: Google hosted video. Saves you time and money

These itself could support the various levels of communication in an organization in a more simpler and more effective way. Adding cherry to the cake is the price. These Google App engine tools come at affordable prices and that too in different editions.

1. Premium edition ($50 per user per year)
2. Education/Non-profit edition (comes free to a limited number of users)
3. Standard edition (comes free to individual users)

You can compare the different editions:

1. Standard Vs Premium
2. Education/Non-profit Vs Premium

You can visit these links to get more information about Google Apps

http://www.google.com/apps/

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html#utm_medium=et&utm_source=catch_all

Google has made some pretty major improvements to the camera application in Android 2.0. This includes more control over white balance, focal length, flash settings, and effects. To complement this Motorola has smartly outfitted the DROID with a 5 megapixel camera coupled with an LED flash. However many initial users claim that the camera is painfully slow to focus and take a snap.

The system comes with a 1400 mAh removable battery which is not bad at all but we expect that it won’t deliver the rated 270 hours standby time or 6 hrs 25 min talktime, especially comparing it to the previous CLIQ. However Motorola has managed to provide a decent talktime of around 5 hrs 30 min, thanks to the somewhat ironic under-clocked CPU!

Who wouldn’t want to trigger their sixth sense, if it is as easy as wearing a pendant around your neck? With this ground breaking invention from Massachusetts Institute of Technology you can do just that if you are willing to spend a meager $350. Soon you will check emails on your palm or a nearby wall, show pictures to your friend standing next you in a crowded street or take snaps with your bare hands.

The project pet named “Sixthsense” is the brain child of Pranav Mistry an Indian Grad student at MIT and his project guide Pattie Maes, at MIT Media Lab. In Pranav’s words “‘SixthSense’ is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information”.

How does it work?

A miniature camera captures your hand gestures that are communicated wirelessly to your mobile phone, which in turn processes your signals and connects to the internet. A small, but powerful projector will project the results back, which are reflected by a mirror to any opaque surface. In short, the hardware consists of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera all compressed into a wearable pendant. Simple! The software mostly tracks the user’s gestures using computer-vision based algorithms.

At the recent TED India conference held in Mysore in November 4 – 7, Pranav announced his desire to open-source his project.  Mistry pays tribute to his architect dad for his innovative spirit.

Read more about Mistry and his revolutionary project here and in this article that appeared yesterday (Nov 8, 2009) in The Hindu.

QBurst Cup 2009, the internal cricket tournament of QBurst technologies will kick-start from 17th October, 8:00AM at the Technopark cricket ground. Invincibles, Knight Riders, Super Sixteen and Phoenix are the four teams participating in this tournament. The tournament is organized in round-robin format with the top two teams finishing in the round play for the title.

The tournament is hosted in the new Cricket tournament hosting platform of Crickees.

Log onto qburst.crickees.com to

- Get to know the teams and players.

- See the tournament fixtures.

- View the latest news and match results.

- Catch live updates of the matches.

- Know who’s the leading run scorer/wicket taker and lots more statistics

- See the standings for each team

- Catch the players in action in the impressive photo gallery

Watch out for more updates coming soon.

Crickees has been instrumental in hosting last year’s Technopark Cricket Tournament and this year, the tournament will be hosted in the new platform of Crickees.

In my previous article, we discussed all the video formats that are predominantly used in web. Here, we are going to see how these different formats are effectively delivered in the web. There are three methods that genuine developers have used so far to bring video into web. Let’s list them chronologically and get to know them in simple terms.

• Downloading

This traditional method is the one in which the user will have to wait for the file to download in his local machine and then play the file in a player. The user will not be able to view the video unless the file is downloaded completely. He must also choose the right player to play the file. Right player, in the sense: the one which understands the codec used by the video file.

Accomplishing this method in a webpage is pretty simple for a developer. He has to upload the file in the web server and provide a link to the file in the webpage. An alternate method is to embed the file in the webpage with a player using a HTML code. When the user clicks the link, the download begins. This method is commonly referred to as HTTP Streaming. This method is still used by a number of sites. And yes the point is it does not cause any trouble if the site traffic is low. One notable inability of this traditional method is that no live streaming can be done since there can never be a complete file during live transmission.

• Streaming

In the case of a streamed video, the file is sent to the end user in a continuous stream which allows him to watch the video as and when it reaches the local system. Streaming has gained so much popularity with live telecasts. When you browse through the web you will find podcasts and webcasts delivering video. Both of these use streaming method to deliver video. A webcast is mostly a single file that is played live or on demand whereas a podcast comes as a series and is delivered on demand. Another widely used streamed application in countries like US and UK is the internet television. Let’s break down streaming and get into the next level.

o   Progressive streaming

o   True streaming

Progressive streaming is used for on demand videos. If the video is delivered progressively, then the video file gets saved in the local system and plays from the local. Once the video is done playing, it will still be available for replay. This is not the case with true streaming which plays the file without saving it in the local. So once the player has completed playing once, it will not be further available for replay. A perfect example would be a live match that is telecasted through the internet.

Streaming is complex which could be understood only when tried. Protocol selection is one which could add to the complexity. Unicast protocols may be a feasible one for modest websites but more number of concurrent users could upset the system unless there is sufficient storage provided. Multicast protocols compel to forgo on demand function which might not be possible for all. UDP (datagram) may not be efficient as the others.

The data (video files) may be stored in-house or outsourced. Most of the companies outsource the complete process in order to avoid complexities. A few major products available to service video on web are FMS (Flash Media Server), Wowza, QTSS (Quick Time Streaming Server). This is another area which I will cover in my next article. Now we’ll move on to the next method.

• Progressive Downloading

The method of progressive download is similar to Streaming. However, this method uses a HTTP protocol. Also there is difference in how data is interpreted at the user’s end. YouTube.com uses progressive download for its video service. Gaining access to the video is also simple as the file is mostly saved in the temp folder. The file could be stolen by anyone and this has given rise to piracy and security problems. In the streaming method, a similar situation will not arise because at no time will the entire file be downloaded locally.

I hope to have put these video concepts in simple terms. Do contact me if you like to know more about video on web.

With the increasing number of video formats, the complexity in identifying the best format has also increased.  Compatibility, size, quality and affordability together determine the format that best suits for any requirement in the web.

A video format used in the web should be compatible with major browsers and Operating Systems. Major browsers include Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and Safari. Major Operating Systems include Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. When it comes to size, the smaller, the better. And when it comes to quality, the higher, the better. The cost factor also plays an important role. I have summarized below, few recognized and used formats in the web with their pros and cons. Proper analysis of our requirement with the capability of the video format will help us to identify the best format for the requirement. These formats are developed and backed up by giants who continuously update and keep them to standards.

• WMV:

Windows Media Video (wmv) is developed and controlled by Microsoft. The video file is based on Microsoft Advanced Systems Format (ASF) container format and is compressed with Windows Media compression. The quality of the video is good and the file is also of low size. One major drawback is that the file runs only on Windows. Neither does it support Flash nor Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) standard.

• Quick Time:

Quick time (.mov) is developed by Apple Inc. The latest released version is 10.0. QuickTime is particularly suited for editing. It contains one or more tracks, each of which contains abstract data references for the media data. QuickTime also supports key standards for web streaming, including HTTP, RTP, and RTSP. Also, QuickTime supports every major file format for images, including JPEG, BMP, PICT, PNG, and GIF. QuickTime also features built-in support for digital video, including MiniDV, DVCPro, and DVCam camcorder formats, as well as support for AVI, AVR, MPEG-1, and OpenDML.

• Real Media:

Real media was the first streaming technology on the market. However, Real media still trails Flash when it comes to smooth playback of high-impact interactive multimedia. Web developers have begun to use the Real System G2 and SMIL to stream synchronized multimedia presentations over the Web. This in turn is promoting a wider usage of real media by the developers in the web.

• Macromedia Flash:

Flash is often referred to as the best solution to web media. However, its unfriendliness with search engines has always left it behind. Flash generates high-impact web multimedia with short sound effects and loops. Formerly called as Future Splash, the Flash company was later acquired by Macromedia in 1997. With Flash, users can also draw their own animations or import other vector-based images.

• MPEG-4:

Developed in 1998, MPEG-4 was specially designed to play streaming media file with high quality in the web. MPEG stands for Moving Picture Experts Group and is managed by ISO (International Organization for Standardization). MPEG-4 is a proprietary technology; it requires licensing in order to be used. AT&T claims to have the patent rights for MPEG. But Apple and a number of other video content providers are continuously working on MPEG along with their technologies.

Stay tuned for my next blog in which, I plan to explain the different methods that are available to deliver these formats on the web.

There were several eyebrows raised, when Wipro appointed Suresh Vaswani and Girish Paranjpe as the joint CEO of Wipro. The new model was proposed by the chairman Mr. Azim Premji, who was the stand-in CEO after Vivek Paul resigned from the company. Amid recession, Wipro outperformed its rivals by an increase of 11.78% in its Q1 revenue that proved the proposed model a big hit!

By this pioneered model, Wipro has reduced the workload at the helm and helped both CEO’s to concentrate on the business verticals that they are responsible for. They have shared the responsibility and integrated all their technology business under a single umbrella. Though the companies would have an extra burden, this model helps them to focus on the business more carefully rather than one executive handling myriad business.

Vendor consolidation has been the norm of the big shots in the recession. Most of the big companies in Europe and America, irrespective of the industry have 100-150 vendors, which include 60-100 vendors handling the pivotal IT support. The current trend is the trimming of the vendors to 5-10%. This will help the Big IT vendors to stay afloat in the recession as 2-3 bulk projects can the turn the game for them.

The outsourcing world has been quite skeptical about Barrack Obama’s ‘Protectionism’, however, if we go by the new consolidation trend, most of the big players in US and Europe will go for vendor consolidation, which can reduce their cost by another 10-15%. The main advantage of this trend is that, if there are fewer vendors, then the access to the sensitive data and the accountability of that can also be restricted to a few, which in turn de-risks data-theft.

As big players hold the benefit in this model, the small players will face the hard side. Companies look for a broader portfolio when they select vendors. This puts small players out of the race. Small players should aggressively bid for small projects and increase the number of deals, as they have to compromise on the margin due to the recession.

Although a frequently used word, I began to think about “Assertiveness” only when I was taking a presentation on “Power & Politics” in my Organizational Behaviour class during MBA. One of the tactics used by people in an organization to gain power over others was stated as “Assertiveness”. I did not provide any further explanation for the term. During the discussion time, one of my classmates in the audience asked me for more details about the term. I fumbled a bit and managed to find my way through . However, our Professor noticed this and later called me to his room and gave me a book on this subject. The insights which I gained from that book are significant and I feel it is very useful in an organizational context. So I am sharing what I know about the topic in this post.

There are four states of behavior of a person:

1. Aggressive
2. Passive
3. Passive/Aggressive
4. Assertive

Let us try to understand the terms with a situation:

You gave a report to a subordinate to be completed at 3 p.m. and he hasn’t given it till 3.15 p.m. The responses from the different behavioral types would be as follows:

The passive person says in a shy way “ Hi,… err… Are you busy?.. I was wondering if…. … if that file is near completion yet?”

The aggressive person goes to the subordinate in a stern way and shouts “ So where is that <____> report?!! .. You are a lazy %#$%#^ “ .

The passive/aggressive person’s comment would be “ I suppose if I want that report I’ll have to do it myself”. This is followed by the self talk “Next time he wants something from me, he is really going to get it ”

An ASSERTIVE person would say “ We agreed the report would be ready by 3 p.m. and now it is 3.15 p.m. Is there a problem?”. He would try to gain an understanding on the situation and find a solution.

You might have noticed such situations during work. It is widely agreed by psychologists that a person and his behavior are different. The outcome of any situation is directly dependent on the person’s behavior. This in turn is dependent on several factors like fears, feelings, emotions, beliefs, experiences, self-esteem, worries, etc. A person responds to the same situation differently depending on his mindset. A clear example that can be provided is the approach which a batsman takes when facing the same bowler in tests and T-20’s. It becomes easier to change your behavior once this realization takes place.

Let us try to describe the term “Assertiveness”

Behavior type: keen to stand up for one’s own rights while accepting that others have rights too.

Four corner stones of assertiveness:

1. Good eye contact
2. Open posture (The open stance has arms and legs not crossed in any way)
3. The words used (Speaking in terms of  “WE” rather than YOU and I” )
4. Neutral tone of voice

How to think assertively:

1. Do a bit of planning about situations that you might encounter.
2. Try to reason with yourself and control your behavior. (This requires conscious thought. )
3. Know your rights – to get respect, to talk, to make mistakes, to choose your own feeling or emotions, etc.

How to behave assertively:

1. Stay in control of your feelings
2. Stand your guard
3. Confront an issue with another person

Sometimes you might be at the other end of an aggressive conversation. To deal with this some techniques can be used. One is to listen to only the words and mentally filtering out the tone and style in which the person is communicating. Other is to keep on asking for facts from the aggressor. The aggressor is sure to tone down if you do not respond in the way he wants you to.

Advantages: You achieve results, people like and respect you, your confidence and self-esteem remains robust, you suffer less stress.

For effectiveness in an organizational setting, a conscious effort and a step-by-step approach of  implementing the idea of assertiveness is needed. Always remember the 4 cornerstones.

“Future is Web” is a phrase we have been hearing for a few years now. And the latest talk on web is the web OS! But on second thoughts, does the web have enough power to replace the feature and flexibility that an OS provides? To mimic the operations of an operating system, we have Java, Flash, Silverlight and similar things. None of these are capable of doing some of the basic features that an OS provides. The basic functionalities that an OS requires like memory and process management, are alien to web applications. The delay in I/O is another key factor which restricts the further development of a web OS. So a pure web OS is a distant future.

The giant has already made promises of a pure web based OS. Yes, I am talking about Google Chrome OS which is in development now. By studying the latest products from Google, it won’t be anything bigger than an Android in better shape. Android which is a purely web oriented OS for mobile phones may be tweaked to an extent where it can be used in low power portable computers, or precisely – Netbooks. But the key point to be noted here is that, Chrome will be a web ‘based’ OS, not an OS in the web. So what will be a pure web OS? And why should one need it?

Mobility is the first advantage of having a pure web OS. Resource sharing and low cost end user hardware is another one. Consider having an entire OS in web, which will handle all the heavy tasks for you and all you need is a cheap, low end, web enabled notebook or netbook which is powerful enough to just run a browser. In short, you can encode an HD video even with a mobile phone! Interesting, isn’t it? Of course it is but the concept is very old and yet to become a reality. A few attempts have been made towards this end and the result was web applications like Google docs and Adobe’s online Photoshop. The interoperability of these online applications is essential for a web OS. No one will like to process a file in one application, download it and upload it to another application. It will be a fair job if these applications can send files/data to each other. It will be much better if both applications have access to a common online storage just like we have hard disks in our PC. And finally, it has to be free and open source! Before someone creates a perfect web OS, let’s take a look at something close to it. The eyeOS – an OS in a browser window, which is the Project of the Month in Sourceforge.

eyeOS is an attempt towards the perfect Web OS. “Open Source Cloud Desktop” is what they call it. You will have all your essential applications, a storage system and a desktop to integrate it all. eyeOS doesn’t look like a web page even though it’s inside the browser window. eyeOS package can be installed in your own server and you can allow other users to sign up and use it. The process is straightforward and simple as installing a Wordpress blog. The wizard driven installation won’t take much time and soon you will be provided with a login window as in normal OS. Once you pass this screen, you will take a couple of seconds to realize that what you are looking at is actually a web page inside a browser window. I was confused whether it was my Linux desktop; it has everything that a normal desktop should have. A task pane, notification area, desktop with changeable wallpapers and themes, games, application menu and everything that you won’t expect in a web page. It even has a browser and a task manager which lists the running processes like Windows Task Manager. The default installation comes with a handful of applications which can be further extended using a package manager like in most Linux distros. There is already a large pool of applications available for eyeOS. And all this is written in PHP and XML! Yes, eyeOS is a PHP application which runs on Apache server and doesn’t need a database. Instead of a database it relies on XML files. This is primarily for making the installation simple for the end user as all they would need to set up an eyeOS server is to enter account information for the first user. Flat files are used to avoid bottlenecks on data fetching. Core parts of eyeOS runs as independent applications and uses Javascript to send server commands. The UI is fast even on a 512kbps connection.

eyeOS is being developed by a company based in Barcelona and it’s currently in the 4th year of development. They also provide a tool kit with which we can develop cloud applications easily. A reasonably good wiki page, including a “Hello World application” is present to provide a walk-through towards eyeOS application development. Anyone fluent with PHP and Javascript can start writing applications for eyeOS without any further learning curve. You can try it out at their demo server : eyeos.info or get your copy of eyeOS package from here.

eyeOS may not be mature enough to host anything serious, but it is proof on how far a web application can go!

From the offset of 2009, the name ‘Satyam’ has been in the news lines of major business newspapers and TV channels. It all started off with the disclosure by Satyam’s founder and then Chairman Ramalinga Raju about the financial fraud did by him and his close colleagues. This scandal rocked the Indian IT business, which was already shattered by the recession and led to a steep decline at the stock market. The Government of India had appointed directors at the Satyam board to find a solution to end this scandal. Finally, Tech Mahindra -The IT arm of Mahindra & Mahindra emerged as the potential buyers of Satyam for $354 million (In 2008, Mr. Anand Mahindra – Vice Chairman of M&M had contacted Mr. Raju for a tie-up, but due to the lack of response from Raju, the alliance didn’t happen.)

There were several eyebrows raised when Mahindra acquired Satyam through the open bid. The primary concern was making the defamed organization a profitable one amid the slow down and merging it with Tech Mahindra. Tech Mahindra’s main intention behind this acquisition is to extend their portfolio beyond telecom. Tech Mahindra, a Joint venture between Mahindra and British Telecom, has 70 of their revenues from telecom and has a very good customer base in Europe. They wanted to extend their reach to US, where Satyam has a good Client base.

Satyam, on the other hand, is diversified: with customers’ in banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), manufacturing, retail and healthcare sectors. Tech Mahindra sees this leverage, when they bid for lucrative projects like ERP, where Satyam has expertise. Though Satyam is calumniated with the corporate fraud, none of its clients have doubt in its ability to deliver. That has prompted Tech Mahindra to go for Satyam.

According to CP. Gurnani, the new CEO of Mahindra Satyam and Sanjay Karla, the CEO of Tech Mahindra; both these companies will bid together for projects to get the leverage of diverse portfolios rather than bidding against each other. Though a comprehensive merging doesn’t look apparent on the cards now, the partnership will catalyze the proposed merger in a couple of years. By that time Mahindra Satyam will re capture its erstwhile structure, which they had before the scandal.