But this study is sure to create an impact in the minds of more and more people, and ultimately drive Microsoft to their worst nightmare of Open Source taking over the corporate word (at least). But let’s talk about Government Initiative in the Open Source… Now there’s a catch!

WARNING: In the following section, I might sound Frankenstein running after NIC’s to rip it’s neck of it’s body.

IBPS Site may damage your PC

Does government actually support FOSS Initiatives ? I don’t know if you are looking at th small line at the bottom of most of the Government websites, where it says – “Please use Internet Explorer 5.5 or above” or “Best viewed on Internet Explorer 5.5 or above” or something analogous. Does it

SBI site is on ASP (Microsoft Active Server Pages) meaning NOT FOSS, they are using Microsoft Technologies and are actually not leveraging the benefits of FOSS where they can be best achieved – WEB and SERVER Technologies. If you anytime in your life have applied for any of the Country’s bank exams be it PO, Managerial or Clerk, you have to visit the site of Institute of Banking Peronnel Selection (IBPS). You would notice that it won’t open on Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari or Google Chrome – it’s is simply loyal to Microsoft Technology – Internet Explorer.

Let’s visualize a simple example, where a person who loves linux or cannot afford Microsoft Window Operating System and want’s to make every move chaste, without the pains of proprietary software involved – Is demoralize, demotivated, his faith shattered to dust with a website popping up saying I need INTERNET EXPLORER! That wasn’t the idea of Tim Berner’s lee when he proposed Internet.

Does Government really support FOSS?

If the government really want’s to take initiatives, it should have made all the websites on NON-Microsoft Technologies, it would have saved them Millions actually Billions. Today NIC has 90% of their websites being maintained on proprietary – age old technologies, that are in no way match for today’s glossy looking, superbly interactive, and Intelligent websites. Are they ? They don’t even look like Corporate/Identity websites for Company information. Even if NOW!, after going through the Prof. Rahul De reports they think of moving from proprietary to FOSS Tech’s – who the hell be accountable for the earlier un-informed baseless decisions ?

The only one of the few website I’ve seen is the NIC’s Indigov. Its’ one of the best website, and based around php. Now what new I see is a Quality certificate being attached to the website by SQTC. Does that make a difference? What is then W3C for? CDAC, NOIDA has been one of the biggest contributor and promoter of W3C in Indian Government sector. However, now NIC & SQTC comes out with their Certificate attached to the website, ignoring all the work done so far in the field by W3C and unnecessarily putting  their precious efforts into standards that have been pre-established. No doubt the website is accessible, but that accounts to just 0.1% of the websites NIC is hosting/developing/maintaining (I would rather say lingering on with). Most of the disabled people are ignored in the country (I know low floor buses just landed in Delhi, but that’s just Delhi -not India right!) and Information Technology is the last seen area where you could consider disabled people to be preferred – in INDIA.

The author is not Anti-Microsoft, he just want the web to be independent, free from the boundaries just like a free bird.  As Internet / Web was essentially created to be platform-independent so that we could; and today as we are able to browse websites over Mobile Phone, Browser’s across operating systems like – Windows, Mac and Linux. And they look same everywhere.

17th Sept, 2009 – HCL Technologies Ltd. (HCL), a leading global IT services provider, entered into a five year Transformational IT Infrastructure Management engagement with Oncor to seamlessly connect and support Oncor corporate functions, grid management operations and numerous community- based field service centers located throughout Oncor’s service area.

Oncor operates the largest electric distribution and transmission system in Texas, delivering power to more than 3 million homes and businesses through approximately 117,000 miles of transmission and distribution lines. “With this new contract, HCL will be investing in both the utilities sector and in Texas, through the development of a worldwide Utilities Center of Expertise in Dallas.

The Center will research and develop technologies to help transform the way energy is generated, marketed and delivered to customers around the world, which fits Oncor’s leadership in advanced Smart Grid technology deployment,” said R Srikrishna, Senior Vice President and Head – Global Sales, HCL Infrastructure Services Division (HCL ISD).

HCL’s scope of work (SoW) will cover end user computing (service desk, desk-side services) for approximately 3,600 employees; datacenter and network Services, business continuity /disaster recovery and consulting services supporting Oncor’s IT infrastructure architecture and platform modernization projects. “Our client services delivery model utilizes local personnel for on-site support, which contributes to local job base stability,” said Todd Crandall, Senior Vice President and Global Head, Energy and Utilities Sector, HCL Axon. “This engagement clearly underlines our commitment and dedicated focus in Texas.”

Now this is interesting they are also utilizing local personnel and following the govt. guidelines as the part of Obama’s initiative to save jobs and reducing the loss of jobs due to off-shoring – great going. I believe it is necessary – Everything can’t be remote!

• Socrata :  Social Data Network. One of the most advanced data creation, collection and management tool.
• Google Docs : One of the most used by me, as all the data gets stored as Excel sheet, Automatic graphs based on data.
• Free Online Surveys : Free Solution for your survey or Quiz needs. Quite an apet
• FormSite : A free and easy to use solution

Google doing Analysis of your data!

<DING> I was writing this article and guess what? Well I received another Question a part of one more Questionnaire, hopefully I was successful in stopping the transfer that could have taken my mind for answering those questions on chat, rather I offered help to make that dull chat session into a simply exciting good looking web based questionnaire using Google Docs, and guess we did!! and we got 35 responses in just 18 hours. There was one another Questionnaire which I made for my junior, which was about 12 pages in length of Microsoft Word format. I still remember it was midnight when I working on it, and till that time she hadn’t got a single response from it. And the very next day even before it was 9 in the night, she had 62 responses right in the excel sheet waiting for to lay her hands on it.

Still the practice, the.. information, the.. simple technological usage that could be easily disseminated among the students, among interns still remains hidden from the most of the world. Well, I hope this article does what is necessary.

It turns out many of the Internet’s top news sites fared better at handling the glut of traffic following the death of singer Michael Jackson than previously thought.

Keynote Systems, a company that tracks site performance, said Friday that it erred in measuring performance for news sites and issued incorrect information Thursday evening.

Dan Berkowitz, Keynote’s spokesman, said the most important thing was to correct the record about ABCNews.com, which he said delivered pages to visitors close to normally during the hour-long traffic spike following Jackson’s death. He added that the company is still studying the causes of the error. A representative for Disney, which owns ABC, said the company saw “no dips in performance” as a result of the traffic glut.

While Keynote’s assessment of site performance may have been overly bleak, many news sites were slow to deliver pages and in some cases were inaccessible at times.

When news of the iconic performer’s death began trickling out, scores of people turned to the Web for information. TMZ broke the news that Jackson, 50, known for producing some of the world’s best selling records, including “Thriller” and “Bad,” had died Thursday afternoon, but the gossip hub cited only unnamed sources and offered few details. As other news services turned their attention to the story and as the public took to the Web to learn more about the performer’s condition, some Web sites began slowing down.

Some Google users complained that the search engine’s News area was inaccessible for a time.

A Google representative confirmed that “between approximately 2:40 p.m. PDT and 3:15 p.m. PDT today, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson.”

CNN.com appeared to be sluggish delivering Jackson stories at times. In its defense, the news organization said that the site saw 20 million page views and a fivefold increase in traffic (from where it was prior to when news about Jackson’s death began widely circulating) in one hour.

Even before Jackson’s death, Thursday was a big day for news sites as word of actress Farrah Fawcett’s death hit the wires in the morning and continued interest in the scandal surrounding South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

The traffic deluge came swiftly and lasted for about a half hour, according to internal data here at CNET News, which saw twice the normal amount of hourly traffic shortly after word of Jackson’s death spread. At sister site CBSNews.com, traffic numbers were five times their normal levels.

On Friday, antivirus vendor Sophos reported on a wave of spam related to Jackson’s death that claims to have vital information about the news event. There are no malicious URLs in the spam, but recipients who reply to the message are then providing proof that the e-mail address is legitimate and will likely be targeted in future spam campaigns, the company said.

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.

This appears to be the same venture that Google discussed in August of 2008, now located at http://www.google.cn/music. The service is actually run through the partially-Google-owned Top100.cn, which is responsible for selling advertising space and divvying up revenues between the music labels. The site will be limited by IP address to those in mainland China, however, so if you’re in Taiwan or any other surrounding area and want to get a taste, you’ll be out of luck.

“This is the first really serious attempt to start monetizing online music in China,” Warner Music Asia president Lachie Rutherford told the Associated Press. Google China president Kai-Fu Lee agreed, adding that today’s launch “complete[s] the puzzle” by offering a fully-integrated set of music and advertising services.

Google’s music search is, of course, a direct response to the popular Chinese search engine Baidu, which has made a name for itself by providing deep links to seemingly unlimited quantities of illegal music. In fact, Baidu has recently come under fire for its MP3 deep-linking policies, as the Music Copyright Society of China and the IFPI have both filed lawsuits against the search engine for the practice.

The ad-supported music venture is the latest in a long string of efforts by Big Content to compete with piracy in China. In November of 2008, Warner Bros. announced that it planned to offer certain films as downloadable rentals in China for a fraction of the cost in other parts of the world (4 to 7 yuan, or roughly 58¢ to $1.02). Before that, Warner China (a joint effort between Warner Bros., China Film Group, and Hengdian Group) announced that it would start selling certain movies just days after their theatrical releases for as low as 10 yuan. Warner Bros. also joined up with Paramount to start selling legit DVDs in China for about 20 to 25 yuan, or just under $3.

One catch to Google’s music service is that it will cooperate with Chinese law and block songs that have been banned by the government. This isn’t exactly a surprising move, however—companies must agree to China’s rules in order to do business there, or they can go home. “When you’re in the music business in China you know you have to follow the regulations,” Rutherford said.

The Big four comprises (along with market share (2005) ) of :

• Universal Music Group (France based) — 31.71%
• Sony BMG Music Entertainment (Japan/Germany based) — 25.61% (13.83% Sony, 11.78% BMG)
• Warner Music Group (USA based) — 15%
• EMI Group (UK based) — 9.55%

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.

So You have only 5 seconds to realize your mistakes !! BE QUICK!!

The Undo link(To save your day!!)

But Yotify offers much more than the search giants’ current alert tools, argues Ron Bouganim, CEO and cofounder of Branchnext, the San Francisco startup behind Yotify. Those alert tools, Bouganim says, are merely an afterthought for these huge companies, and they do not take into account important Web 2.0 developments, such as social networking.

“We want to create a richer experience,” Bouganim says.

When users sign up for an account, they are given a personal profile page that lists, stores, and displays what they’ve searched for and where. That information can be made public as well, so that friends can share the results and help refine the search. This could be particularly useful for group projects such as apartment hunting with roommates, for example.

Meanwhile, Yotify is making it a point to closely integrate with the major social-networking sites, most notably Facebook and LinkedIn. “If people want to search through Facebook using our technology, we want to let them do it,” claims Bouganim.

Another distinguishing characteristic of Yotify versus Google Alerts or Yahoo Alerts is its focus on shopping. Whereas Google Alerts is primarily concerned with retrieving news and other hard information, Yotify is setting up as more of a sales tool for its partner sites, which include general retailers such as Shopping.com as well as a host of niche players.

In this respect, Yotify does go above and beyond what Google Alerts currently provides. Say a user wants to buy a black futon, for example. The important aspect of the search is not that the user obtain the futon immediately, but that it’s a certain price. Yotify will continually monitor its partner sites, then notify the user when a black futon is available at that particular price.

The main problem with Yotify is that, as of now, it only scans a small portion of the Web: users can only search among Yotify’s partner sites. While the search engine has partnered with many key websites, such as Craigslist, the New York Times, and eBay, it certainly does not have the breadth of a search giant such as Google or Yahoo.

But the point to be noted here your honor is

• People do the search,
• Google pays money for the ads clicked on the searched results

For all the .GOV.IN and .NIC.IN government websites, who takes the money ? I just want to know who’s the person? Is it the government using its own code to place search engines and getting all the money or is it some one else? We’ve got 2 options to find it out..

• Keep Thinking – You’ll never know!
• File an RTI – Let’s see If I’m able to do so!

Till then keep thinking!

“The Google Earth is providing high resolution data in the order of less than a metre. But the data is two to three years old. It cannot be of much use for any real-time exercise. But Bhuvan will provide the relevant data for any real-time exercise,” S K Pathan, Head, Geo Informatics Data Division, ISRO, said.

Bhuvan, to be launched by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), will be a better alternative to Google Earth in terms of quality of data, he said.

“Bhuvan, which means earth, will get the images from the satellites and provide high resolution imagery data of the order of five metre. This can be of use for real-time exercises like disaster management and military operations,” he said.

For real-time exercises, the latest data is a guiding force, he said. It can show the topography, altitude, depth and other features of any specific location.

“This information will be required when you are undertaking a massive exercise like flood management or post-cyclone disaster mitigation,” he said.

The data could be of use to manage public services, internal security, town planning and infrastructure development activities.

Courtesy: The Hindu

Taking the concern of the Global warming and the ecological problems, Google is coming with PowerMeter that can give real time data

One place the company is looking is into people’s homes.  Google is  working on Google PowerMeter, prototype software that will allow users to receive energy usage data from compatible “smart meters” and use that information to optimize their energy use.

The company made the announcement in a blog post that explains its broader effort to encourage the development of a “smart grid,” a next-generation electrical distribution system that supports bidirectional energy and revenue flow.

“Google’s mission is to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,’ and we believe consumers have a right to detailed information about their home electricity use,” said Google engineer Ed Lu. “We’re tackling the challenge on several fronts, from policy advocacy to developing consumer tools, and even investing in smart grid companies. We’ve been participating in the dialogue in Washington, D.C., and with public agencies in the U.S. and other parts of the world, to advocate for investment in the building of a ‘smart grid,’ to bring our 1950s-era electricity grid into the digital age.”

Smart meters, a key component in a smart grid, differ from standard power meters in that they can provide real-time energy-use data and price data to utility customers.

At present, there are about 40 million of the devices in use worldwide, with an additional 100 million planned over the next few years, according to Google. The Obama administration’s recovery plan calls for 40 million smart meters to be deployed in the United States over the next three years.

For More Click here

• 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.

• Education,
• Information
• Communication
• Entertainment

The Internet Bus will be loaded with useful and informative content in English and Tamil.
The intent of the project is to showcase, how the Internet can make everyday life simple through services like Search, Email, Social Networking, Maps and others.
I think that it is a right initiative taken bay Google to educate people about the power of internet and how it can change their lives.
Google is known for developing cutting edge software solutions that are very simple to use and of course free also and now it has taken another step to make Internet an integral and non seaerable part of human lives.

Hail Goolge!!
visit Officila site

The new program expands a two-year-old service that allows Google News users to search the archives of some major newspapers and magazines, includingThe New York Times, The Washington Post and Time, that were already available in digital form. Readers will be able to search the archives using keywords and view articles as they appeared originally in the print pages of newspapers.

Under the expanded program, Google will shoulder the cost of digitizing newspaper archives, much as the company does with its book-scanning project. Google angered some book publishers because it had failed to seek permission to scan books that were protected by copyrights. It will obtain permission from newspaper publishers before scanning their archives.

Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., will place advertisements alongside search results, and share the revenue from those ads with newspaper publishers.

Initially, the archives will be available through Google News, but the company plans to give newspapers a way to make their archives available on their own sites.