Isaac Daniel, whose Global Positioning System (GPS) sneakers gained worldwide attention in 2007, has announced the company’s newest GPS shoe,  Blue GPS. The new version of the GPS shoe is being billed as a social networking shoe. Called Blue GPS because of their Bluetooth capability, the new shoes enable the wearer to be tracked by friends and family through their cell phones. The wearer simply inputs up to five phone numbers of family/friends into his cell phone (eventually this capability will be able to be expanded to up to 20 people) and pushes a button on the shoe to activate a link with those on his list. The Blue GPS can be enabled with all cellular phones.

“This is an important step in the progression of our company and product line,” said Isaac Daniel, chairman, IDG (Isaac Daniel Group). “This is an affordable price point for consumers and a fun product to have. People will be able to see where their friends are — and have a better idea of estimated arrival time — without having to call them. And, because the wearer doesn’t have to be talking on the phone while driving, it will definitely improve safety.”

Daniel, on a recent business trip to Europe, tested the phone with various friends and business associates in the United States, Europe and Africa.

“I inputted several names worldwide and activated the link,” he said. “They were able to track me via their cell phones and even on Facebook. That’s why we refer to the Blue GPS as social networking with your feet.”

In addition to the button linking the shoe and cell phone users, another button can be pressed for an ‘E911′ call. When that button is pushed, a signal is sent to IDG’s monitoring division, ID Conex, which then attempts to contact the wearer. If the shoe wearer does not respond, ID Conex then alerts the proper authorities.

Daniel also emphasised that the original GPS shoes — using IDG’s patented Quantum Satellite Technology — are currently being field tested for future military and healthcare industry usage.

Blue GPS is expected to retail for about $150 when it hits stores in Latin America this fall.

Now that is some Extra Ordinary Extra intelligent footwear one can buy!!

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Wave is a very bold way to re-write the manner in which people communicate and interact online. It is nothing conventional you can think of. Google merges your e-mails, IMs, Twits, Facebook and a lot of other such services and offers them under one roof called Wave.

You can understand Wave as a content that you have created. Let’s assume this news item. Now, you can share this news with people, and your friends may keep adding content to it. They may write some more, add some pics, comment through twits and much more. According to Google Blog, “A ‘wave’ is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more.”

Here’s how it works:

In Google Wave, you create a Wave and add people to it. Everyone on your Wave can use formatted text, photos, gadgets and even feeds from other sources on the Web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your Wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use ‘playback’ to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the ‘live’ concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone’s Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, Google says it intends to open source the code behind Google Wave.

Google has not yet decided the specific time frame for public release, but plans to continue working on Google Wave for a number of months more as a developer preview.

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Pixaaza Technology

Here’s another quickie, Google now backs Pixazza a new advertisement technology, its quite similar to what Google has been doing with the text – showing advertisements based on the text on the webpages. Pixazza is very similar to that except that it applies to the pictures. People tag the pictures (or part of the picture) with the links of the online merchants, they are given commissions based on the number of hits, their links recieve.

Pixazza’s “experts” are paid a commission based on sales from their links. The start-up also employs reviewers that track the links. “There’s a work queue of all the images that come in and you can see which are high-traffic images and which are interesting to users,” said Bob Lisbonne, chief executive of Pixazza.

Pixazza has signed up with Amazon.com, Bluefly and Zappos. Pixazza is currently targeting Fashion industry as per the teh CEO Bob Lisbonne. However there are other websites which are following similar for years, one of them being – Coolspotters. Somewhere in the world of web even Microsoft has filed a patient for the technology even before Pixazza, but I guess they got late!

But still I believe, Pixazza has an edge over everything -

• It has “the publisher” involved, that means people can use a single line of javascript to use technology for images on their site.
• People will do anything to make money (even if it takes hours to tag pictures), so tagging isn’t a problem, its good.
• They have Google to support them!
  • Google can utilize Pixazza’s technology with their image labeler, and ultimately with Adsense
  • Google can ultimately acquire Pixazza

Well that was it, It wasn’t quick.. right? Anyways I hope you have learnt a new technology coming your way.

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Playing games to surfing the internet on the Smart Phones is common now and the advertisers are finding ways and means to target your smart phones also. As the technology advances with GPRS ,GPS 3G and  4 G on their way to your phone advertisements do not seem to leave your lives soon!

The millions of people who use their cellphones daily to play games, download applications and browse the internet may not realise that they havean unseen companion: advertisers that can track their interests, their habits and even their location.

Smartphones, like the iPhone and BlackBerry Curve, are the latest and potentially most extensive way for advertisers to aim ads at certain consumers. Advertisers already tailor ads for small groups of consumers on the web based on personal information. But cellphones have a much higher potential for personalised advertising, especially when they use applications like Yelp or Urbanspoon with GPS to identify a person’s location, right down to the street corner where they are standing.
Advertisers will pay high rates for the ability to show, for example, ads for a nearby restaurant to someone leaving a Broadway show, especially when coupled with information about the gender, age, finances and interests of the consumer.

Eswar Priyadarshan, the chief technology officer of Quattro Wireless, which places advertising for clients like Sony on mobile sites, says he typically has 20 pieces of information about a customer who has visited a site or played with an application in his network. “The basic idea is, you go through all these channels, and you get as much data as possible,” he said.
The capability for collecting information has alarmed privacy advocates.

“It’s potentially a portable, personal spy,” said Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, who will appear before Federal Trade Commission staff members this month to brief them on privacy and mobile marketing. He is particularly concerned about data breaches, advertisers’ access to sensitive health or financial information, and a lack of transparency about how advertisers are collecting data. “Users are going to be inclined to say, sure, what’s harmful about a click, not realising that they’ve consented to give up their information.”

For now, advertisers are using a wide lens to survey people’s behaviour on phones, aiming at people by city rather than by specific neighbourhood or street.

And while they collect specifics about how someone behaves on the mobile website — for instance, that someone bought a “Hot N Cold” ring tone after seeing an ad for it, then watched a Miley Cyrus video on TMZ.com — they use that information to categorise that person as a pop-culture fan, and then show a movie ad.

Advertisers are eager to use the information for much more specific targeting, however. An advertising system could know, for instance, that someone is 27 years old, male, a New England Patriots fan (which NFL.com can track), plays Blackjack, travels frequently between Boston and New York on weekdays (which applications using GPS can track) and uses a 3G iPhone. That would make him attractive to a host of advertisers, like the Delta Shuttle or a Las Vegas hotel, whose ads would appear while the consumer was browsing on his phone.

“Everyone’s in an arms race to find out more and more about their users,” said Eric Bader, the managing partner of the mobile advertising firm Brand in Hand. Even application developers are handing over information about their customers to marketers. Dockers San Francisco, a brand of Levi Strauss, for instance, is beginning a campaign this week that will run on applications like iBasketball and iGolf. It will show a model wearing khakis, and the iPhone customer can shake the phone to see the model dance.

Dockers will start by tracking how long people shake the ad, and then “if it does make sense to do follow-up with these consumers, we’ll do that,” said Jonathan Haber, the United States director of Ignition Factory at OMD, the media agency directing the campaign. “We dig in, specifically, with these application developers and owners to get information about usage behaviour.”

It’s not just behaviour, but also data on income, or even whether you have children, that advertisers consider. A company called Acuity Mobile, whose clients include the MGM Mirage and Harrah’s Entertainment, lets clients use consumer data, including, potentially, income, to determine what kind of offers clients should see.

Way to go Advertisers!!!

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• Google with its new service allows users to keep track of their friends using Google Maps.
• SMS, IM or give a phone call to them.
• Give you a complete privacy control.

Now that’s something really and closely integrated set of services. I mean they are utilizing every bit their services.

• Google Maps service – The Core for the platform,
• Google SMS Channels (launched specifically for India, I believe they are!) or GMail SMS launched for U.S.
• Google Talk for calling your friends
• iGoogle Gadget (which is used when you are on your laptop/desktop)
• Orkut – Now that’s my intuition! I believe Orkut is soon going to be part of this service set: Google Friends Map, may be who knows!

Mobile, with its wide user base is sure to be the next monetization platform. How about this, You are walking towards a mall, and you get a message – “Your friend Rohit is just 5 Kms away from you, moving towards Delhi Cantt” (Of course with an ad below it). Now that could really be interesting.

Hope to see something more innovative and monetizing coming out of the Google Labs! Let’s see what’s the next step the giant takes.

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The Chennai Agriculture Department has created a record by producing more than 10 tonnes of paddy per hectare in select pockets in the State by adopting the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) technique. The average productivity in the State is 4 to 5 tonnes per hectare. The maximum yield was achieved by a farmer in Tiruvannamalai district, who had harvested 14.27 tonnes per hectare and by another farmer in Kallakurichi in Villupuram district whose per hectare yield was 13.38 tonnes.

I was happy to notice, at least some universities are actually progressed on the practical front, rather than disillusioning students with theoretical-memory-intensive-exhaustive-exam

s.

This, according to department officials … claimed that it was a phenomenal record as the average productivity was less than 3 tonnes in the country…Continuous monitoring by the officials and agriculture scientists of Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU) and the cooperation of the farmers resulted in the high yield …technique had proved to enhance rice productivity by 30 to 40 %per cent with comparatively less water, the is taking steps to popularize it for large-scale adoption.

Well, I was searching through sites and other places for the theory of this efficient technique when I landed here. One can find wealth of resources here. One of being the presentation down below. I’ve just uploaded the pdf version as is, so that people can view the presentation right away. Its a very enlightening presentation, gives a very good view point of what SRI is, and focus on statistics and yield improvement following the practice.

The SRI technique requires considerably less amount of following than that would have taken in the conventional methods -

• Seeds,
• Fertilizers,
• Labour,
• Water
• Nursery area.

On an average, a farmer could save at least Rs.1,600 per hectare by adopting the technique, the officials said.

Sources:

• The Hindu (Google) <|> HinduOnNet (Google)
• System of Rice Intensification <|> SRI, India Specific
• SRI India

I find The Hindu only one country newspaper which is keeping a track of all the developments in Indian agriculture at least SRI very-very closely. Just final closing words, I went to the Department of Agriculture, Andhra Pradesh Website and took some stats from there -

• Achievement of Action Plan 2007-08
  • Organized 3,557 demonstrations on SRI @ 100 ha area per demonstration
• Action Plan 2008-09
  • Demonstration on 0.4 Ha of Land area, each costing Rs. 3000/- per demonstrations.
  • It is planned to organize 1680 demonstrations with an estimated cost of Rs. 50.40 lakhs during the eleventh plan period.

I also went to the Tamil Nadu’s State Agriculture Website, but didn’t find an English version (that’s one), the other being no published document called ‘action plan‘. The best of all, the State Agricultural departmental webiste is not even listed on the department wise list of state website.

I think all the government have short-comings here or there! Anyways, I’m tired of the websites being created by NIC. They are worst ever Govt. websites in the whole damn world. I’ve an article kept in the draft mode for quite long time focused on technical shortcoming HOLES in NIC run websites, I will soon publish it.

Namaskaar for now!

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News has been about how laptops will be manufactured is what BRICK is all about. Some sources suggests Apple will build the notebook out of a single piece of carved-out aluminum—a brick.

If you’re working with one single unit of metal, you’re reducing a lot of the materials costs and also a lot of labor time on assembly,

Keller, an Analyst at market research firm iSuppli

• Using a single piece of metal would also provide the opportunity for the kind of design flourishes that distinguish Apple and its chief executive, Steve Jobs.

• Screws might be minimized or eliminated entirely. Seams joining different pieces of metal would disappear. In short, these notebooks would be unlike anything else on the market in appearance and design.

But coring out a block of aluminum, while fairly common in some products, such as types of wireless telecom gear. It is a slow process. The issue for Apple, which would presumably be doing it millions of times, would be speed. It’s very time-intensive. Presumably, Apple could bring innovation aimed at streamlining the manufacturing process.

Keller

In May 2007, it filed for a patent on a design for “enclosure parts that are structurally bonded together to form a singular composite structure…. That is particularly useful in portable computing devices such as laptop computers.”

So, if all the points are to be taken into consideration laptops MacBooks could be cheap. But I won’t expect Apple to be selling them at a the same price they would be selling in other countries (iPhone was launched in India priced thrice the price of iPhone in US).

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Google Docs is the best office suite, that gives you the power of collaboration. Google Docs consists of 3 Core Office applications -

• Documents
• Spreadsheets
• Presentations

Google Document -

It’s similar to MS-WORD, it provides you with all the features that MS-Word gives you, from writing text, editing, managing, changing styles, inserting images, etc. The plus point that MS-Word doesn’t give you is – Direct conversion of that document to HTML / PDF / DOC / RTF / TXT / ODT within seconds. Even MS-WORD Converts the Document to HTML but the HTML converted isn’t clean & recommended for direct use with Web. As far as PDF is concerned you need to have additional Software..!!

Google Spreadsheets -

I haven’t worked with the spreadsheets that long & deep, but still experience with it is good enough. Though looking around you’ll find all the formulas that Excel Gives – Column Sorting, Auto-fill, Charts, & some of them like integration with Google finance that even Excel can’t provide .

Google Presentations -

Now this is something which would bring MS to it’s knees. Presentations is one big thing that Google has recently launched on it’s 9th Anniversary. It’s still in BETA Stage – you won’t be able to add Animations to it, still You can create slides, use themes, etc.

The common features to all these 3 Superb products are -

• No Installations – No need to install, except your Browser & Internet Connection.
• Anytime Anywhere access.
• Off-Line & On-Line – Edit Off-line ( Word / Excel / Powerpoint ), upload and Access online.
• Support for large base of Export Formats.
• Simultaneous Editing of the same document.
• Share your Documents with Group of People or Publish it on the WWW.
• Simple yet Secure.
• Restore previous versions of the Documents.
• Invite Users to help you EDIT or Just View the document.
• Lucrative Template / CSS Support

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Google Apps for your Domain is a set of tightly integrated services from Google. It gives your organization a quick start over the web, it includes customizable GMail based eMail service, Google Talk, Google Docs, Google Calender and Google Pages.

Initially targeted for organizations, Google Apps is now available for Organizations, Schools, education institutions and Universities. Unlike other Google services (GMail, YouTube, Orkut, etc. ) which are available for FREE as BEER, Google decided to follow an alternate route to their services -

• Standard Edition – Still FREE as BEER,
• Premium Edition - (about $50/user) Not for poor publisher like me and
• Education Edition – FREE & the best I think but hard to get, you gotcha’ own your very own Educational Institution.

I’ve been a Google Apps (Standard Edition) user for more than 2 years now, and there are few things that could really help you in case you are opting for Google Apps.

The Light Side.. Even if you don’t own a domain, Google gives you an option to buy one. The good thing is Google is in partnerships with the world’s 2 biggest Domain Registrars – GoDaddy & eNom. The better thing is – The size always doesn’t matter, If you go to GoDaddy or eNom to register a domain name it would cost you your pants, probably your undies too. But Google made it a point to provide things as cheap, even your daily dinner would seem more. You can go for domain for $10 (~INR 400). You also get to have hands on DNS Management / Control Panels from both GoDaddy & eNom. I found GoDaddy’s control panel more user friendly as compared to eNom’s.

As soon as your domain has been verified by Google, you are given access to the a whole pool of services.

It’s unmatched eMail Service is the first one I would love to talk about. It gives you your own eMail service with the same afresh looking interface of GMail, and that too with 6 GB of space per eMail ID. Google initially gives you 200 ID’s / eMail addresses if you purchase domain from Google, else if you already own a domain you can type in the magic number you want, so far so good 500 has worked for me. You can even increase the number of ID’s you want at a later stage all it calls for is a Convincing & Valid request to Google.

Office 97..2000..2003 .. Online. Google made history after the launch of its Google Docs’ service. Google Docs has almost all the features that an Office suit should have, all that costs you is your Internet Connection’s bill. You can create Word Documents, Spreadsheets – that can fetch information from Google Finance and Presentations that can run on web. Google Docs even provide options for you to export / import your documents. Google Docs is a whole product in itself.

A Google Solution for Your Own Co. Name, Your own VoIP Messenger, Yes!! and that too without any in-house or outsource development cost. You can use the same old “Google Talk“, just make sure you sign in with – YourID@YourDomainName.com. Then you have what Google calls it as Google Pages, a similar kind of thing to Yahoo! Geocities. Google gives you a decent enough solution to start your own home page, you have various layouts, themes and Google gadgets to help you quickly fill your home page with content.

Branding: Google’s policy, legacy or whatever you call it – It creates the services but gives control in hands of people to customize, “use it the way you like it” way. Google Apps incorporates the same old legacy, You can change the Google’s logo to your Own Co’s logo. Although it has usual Google words but it still gives you a great feel of your company being associated with a co. like Google.

The Dark Side..

Google is driven by internet advertisement, so be ready with the usual advertisement when you are checking your mail. The bad thing is it doesn’t let you monitor the mails of other employees. You cannot receive mails which are being delivered to all users, and you can’t use other email management features which are available to you from your hosting provider. So if you are looking for some Holmes’ kind of stuff, don’t count on Google’s standard edition. The Premier edition gives you a policy management, recovery of deleted emails & in short a more better control but it has a price.

Scenario:

A typical application of Google Apps (Standard Edition) is to domains like DelhiTechies, where there are few users who work in collaboration & trust. Generally when you go to buy domain name you don’t get hosting and email service for FREE & in most cases you don’t even have access to DNS Management until your hosting provider makes it available to you, you have to pay for it. This is when Google takes over, it gives you a Domain Name, an unmatched eMail service, unlimited number of web pages to get your website up & runnning in absolutely no time. Organizations that totally dependend on Google Apps do save costs too, a common cost saving would be licensing fee for Office products – Google Docs is a great service to use in conjunction with Google Apps.

There are more application scenarios to Google Apps, if you are using one or have an idea about, you are most welcome to discuss here.

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