Fake Office - Microsoft can't take competition

On Nov 3rd, there was an article where Microsoft announced drop in the rates of their Could Apps. In that, the Corporate VP of Microsoft Online said Zoho, Google and Zimbra are fake office tools and they don't compare with Microsoft office. Everyone now knows that this isn't true. Infact I had written an article where I mentioned about Zoho and Google Docs and their advantages of being Online.

Zoho, reacted to Microsoft's statement and wrote a blog post on this on Nov 4th and next day they came up with "Fake Office" website to talk about what Microsoft mentioned as fake and a real cool Fake Office Movie. I love this short movie and the song, its awesome.
It clearly shows that Microsoft really could not accept the competition and the fact that it is losing out on the Office war and started these mind games of blaming. Zoho you really rock!!!

Yahoo! GeoCities closing down permanently

Yahoo! GeoCities, one of the oldest and famous web hosting service is going down permanently today October 26th 2009. One of the reasons being that Yahoo! wants to concentrate more on other online services enhancing customer satisfaction and also improve upon its award winning Yahoo! Web Hosting service instead.


Today, all the webpages and images will be permanently deleted from the Yahoo! GeoCities servers. One of the FAQ states:

"After October 26, your GeoCities files will be deleted from our servers, and will not be recoverable."

Many people surely will get impacted because of this, but there is not much time for people to react now. Users can either upgrade their GeoCities to Yahoo! Web Hosting or download their data onto their PCs. Yahoo! no longer offers free hosting options. If you are looking free hosting, you might consider one of these free services.

• Tripod
• Webs.com
• Weebly
• WebStarts.com
• SynthaSite
• Wikispaces

Google Wave: Redefining email, chat and more...

Ever wondered that the email framework or the way conversations happens today is good and all we need is minor tweaks on features and performance only??? I guess many or almost all in this world would have though so. But its not just that much we need, as rightly said by Jens Rasmussen, if we ought to invent EMail today, how it would have been? We need to think from the scratch and identify what all we want to do with it. We need to think out of the box, in a broad way and not just in the narrow path of the existing email theme.

Thats was Google has done and 2 years after starting the prototyping, Google has comeup with Google Wave a service which is in developer preview mode, yet to be launched to public, is a service which shows all new way to converse over email, chat, share, and lot more.

Last week in Google I/O, Google Wave was demonstrated and all the strengths of wave was showcased. Its not all, Google Wave is a open source platform, and the technology is also open for others to try new things with it. If you want to write gadgets or do more with Google Wave, the APIs are available at your service. To know more of the protocol, go to waveprotocol.

Watch the entire demo at the Google I/O:

Cloud Computing to the Next Level

In today's world Cloud Computing is a very common topic. Everyone talks about clouds and doing the computing in large scale in clouds. Cloud in simple terms is nothing but a set of machines with huge capacity and hardware for faster, fatter computations. The machines are not owned by individual, but some service provides like Amazon, and everyone can pay and use those machines and memory.

Things looks nice till now. But today the cloud computing has reached to the next level. Put your PC on the cloud...yes you read it right. The desktop that you have is no longer required. Airtel the leading mobile company in India, provides a broadband service and the broadband users now have a chance to put their PC on the cloud i.e. you will be given a LCD monitor, keyboard and mouse along with the broadband connection and thats it, the harddrive, OS, softwares all are on the cloud and you just access them using your broadband connection.

The PC which is now on the internet will have the original Microsoft Windows Online Desktop and MS Office and 10GB of drive space. There are different traiffs and each comes with its own features for the Net PC. But in all variants there is a 100% guarantee for the data and hence no crashes or data loss at all.

Things that can be done with a search box

Ever wondered what can be done with search box of Google. Like many people I used to use it only for searching the net for some information, documents, links, pages, etc... But is it all it is used for? The answers is NO . Quite sometime back(probably years back) I wanted to check for time in San Francisco. I tried to search for its timezone and the difference between that time zone and IST and all the math. But then the search gave me an answer and I was shocked and happy about it. I searched for "time in San Francisco" and the first result was the time in San Francisco right away.

Then I started exploring and using it to get the definitions/meanings of words, currency conversion, movies show timings, unit conversion, weather and a host of other reasons. Google does provide a lot more features and its nice to see that the simple search box can act as the all-in-one tool which can find answers for many day to day requirements.

All the features are clearly explained with an example at Google Search Features page. Its a very useful resource. Now, most of these are also available on other search engines like Y!, Windows Live, etc...

Movement to ban Comic Sans Font

"Comic Sans" the most famous font is facing criticism from some people around the world. The claim is that is fun, breezy, silly or vulgar and lazy. But I like this font. Unfortunately the blogger editor does not support that font, else all my posts would have been in that font.

See this to know more about this movement. But at the same time there are many people who love the font. I hope the font stays back forever.

Mobile Office - Current World

In the world of mobile, where everything can be done by mobile phones, more and more people are getting used to these so called business mobiles, entertainment mobiles and the phones which are a mix of these two i.e. having the best of both worlds like iPhone, Win Mos, Androids, etc...

But as a business user, one has a requirement to check mails, calendar, organizer, phone, messenger, etc. But is there a requirement to read or edit documents, spreadsheets, presentations? The answer to this will be a big YES from all.

If so, what are the options available?
a. WinMo: Most of the windows mobile phones have a built in office, which has the capability to read/edit documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc... Different providers like Samsung, HTC, etc... have these models.

b. iPhone: iPhone by default comes with an in-built feature to read the MS Office documents, but there is no easier way to edit them. Recently, Quickoffice made an announcement that they will release a App for iPhone by the end of this month. Microsoft itself is in the foray to release an office app for iPhone, but there is not time line announced yet. But there is an app Spreadsheet from Softalk Ltd already available to create spreadsheets on iphone, but there is a catch, you can create new spreadsheets but not import existing ones, which kind of makes the app useless to some extent.

Along with all these built-in or plugin kind of support, there is always a global way.

a. Zoho: Zoho is an online office space, where you can upload/import any MS office documents, read/edit/share/download back. Along with all these it has support for mobile versions i.e iZoho.com which you can use from your WinMo or iPhone and start working on your documents without worrying if there is a support from the phone itself or not.

b. Google Docs: Google Docs also provides a way to edit the docs via m.google.com/docs (from your phone). You can import your existing docs into Google Docs and start working on them here.

Though these 2 options works fine, it needs you to be in Wifi area or using the Data Network from your service provider. But a built in support would be what people wish to have because its easy, cost effective and better performance. The upcoming WinMos are good in that sense, but iPhone needs some more support for sure.

Google's April Fool Prank - CADIE

It was nice to see a overwhelming response received for my previous post on "Gmail Autopilot - Page not found". Though it was a traditional prank, the point was the link that it showed up was not working and it gave Page Not Found. Today the same link works fine, try it here.

So the question still continues as to whether the feature is a prank or the link not found? Anyways, now its all clear that this prank didn't go well this time as compared to the previous instances. This feature description itself makes one to be suspicious as compared to the previous ones.

Google Summer for Code 2009 is now OPEN

Google Summer for Code 2009 is now open and accepting the applications for this years program. Students who have a great ideas and interest in working on problems can apply and get an experience of Open Source development.

Students can choose from 150 Open source Software projects and will be paired with mentor for guidance and coaching for three months and on successful completion will receive a stipend for $4500.

Students should read the User Guide and register for the program here.The member who wants to join here should be a student or act as a mentor. People from any part of the world can join except from a few as said in this FAQ.

Mentor organizations must be organizations or individuals running an active and viable open source or free software project whose applications are approved by Google's Open Source Programs Office. Organizations based in Iran, Syria, Cuba, Sudan, North Korea and Mynamar (Burma), with whom we are prohibited by U.S. law from engaging in commerce, are ineligible to participate. Please see our Program Terms of Service for additional stipulations and requirements.

More details on the same can be found here.

Nano - Smallest and Cheapest Car is Out!

The most awaited "TATA Nano" car is out today. The chairman of Tata Group Ratan Tata launched it today in Mumbai. This is said to be cheapest car with 4-seater capacity, very good mileage of 23+ kmpl. Though people are concerned about the security standards, but Tata hold on to its promise by delivering a Bharat III standard car with the required amount of safety features.

The basic model is Rs. 1.12L (~$ 2200) , while the luxury model is at Rs. 1.70L (~ $3300). People can register for the car by applying in any of the Tata Motors agencies or in State Bank of India as well, and the cars will be given on a lottery basis. SBI has come up with an attractive loans for prospective buyers as well.

There is another attractive offer from Tata. If you apply for the car by paying the minimum amount of 70-80% of the car and if you don't get the car by lottery with in 1year, then you are eligible to get an interest on your money at the rate of 8.5%, so its a no loss for the customer.

But the only concern is once Tata sells 1 lakh carsm it says it might revise the rate, which means probably the first 1 lakh customers are only lucky. If you are one of them, them you are very lucky!!!

URL: http://ibnlive.in.com/news/ratan-tata-launches-nano-in-mumbai/88445-25.html

Send of a Mail - Undo or Later

today announced a new feature in Labs called 'Undo Send', which allows the user to revoke/undo the mail just sent. Hold on! its not a anytime revoke, it has pre-determined time limit of 5 secs. Once you hit the "Send" button, you will have 5 secs before you hit "Undo" to avoid sending the mail.

This is a very nice feature at times, when you quickly hit the "Send" and then realized that you missed to attach a file, or forgot to add your signature, or forgot to add couple more email Ids, etc.. But the question lies in how best the usecase is and how best the solution here is.

I think everyone agrees to the fact that there should be a option to undo a sent mail for all possible reasons. So, lets see the options available. The service from GMail is already explained, so lets now see the options from other mail services.

1. (Zoho Mail): Zoho is one of the good mail services. I am unable to rate this with GMail, but at times GMail wins. Zoho Mail service offered lot of features which GMail offered very late. Classic example is the Offline Mail from GMail using Google Gears. Zoho had this service a long back. Now coming back to the feature being discussed here. Zoho has a service called "Outbox". One can enable this in the "Settings" and provide a customized time limit (specified in minutes only) as to when the mail has to be sent from the "Outbox". So, when you hit "Send" the mail will sit in the "Outbox" till its time comes.



2. (In Mail): "In" the service of Network18 is pretty new email service. It has a similar feature called "Future Mail". Once you compose the mail instead of hitting the "Send" button, there is a new button called "Send as Future Mail". Click on that and it will show you a scheduler, and choose the date, month, year and time as to when the mail has to be sent.
Now, you may ask; this is a different feature altogether, because here user is forced to select the time for each mail, which is not the case with Zoho Mail or GMail. Yes, but the service is similar and allows the user to schedule the send time which is very useful to send greetings, send when the Internet is free during nights, etc.. and by the time the mail goes, you have the time to edit it and do all the modifications required.

iPhone OS 3.0 for iPhone 3G

Good news is finally out. Apple come out with a new OS 3.0 for its most popular product (the phone which revolutionized the mobile phone world) iPhone. On March 17th Apply showcased its OS 3.0 in an event at Apple's Cupertino Headquaters. Along with demoing the new OS, it gave immediate access to the members of the iPhone Development Program.

The highlight of the event and OS 3.0 platform is that it comes with 100+ new features and 1000+ SDK APIs for development. Of the features, the most popular include Cut/Copy&Paste, MMS, and Read-Compose email and text messages in landscape mode. These are just a few popular features that were missing in the older OS 2.0.

Compared to the iPhone built-in features, the features for the Apps and Apps Developers are more and more interesting. There is this new App Purchase Feature, Push Notification Feature, Peer-Peer Communication, etc.. and a lot more.

Catch the Keynote Address of the event here.

Google Chrome back to BETA channel again.

Google Chrome Browser a very strong effort put forth by Google Team to change the way Internet Browsing happens and to steal the IE market from Microsoft came out of BETA in last December.

But was Chrome good enough to be out of beta? Not sure, not even the Google team. Since then there are couple of fixes and release happening and now Google Chrome team has brought back the BETA release again..wait its not all BETA now. Google this time came up with this new idea to help its users to use either a stable version or get the help from users by releasing a BETA version as well, which users can try.

There are lots of new features in the BETA, viz... form autofill, full page zoom, autoscroll, and a cool new way to drag tabs out to get a side-by-side view(see the video below). The best of all is the speed — it's 25% faster on the V8 benchmark and 35% faster on the Sunspider benchmark than the current stable channel version and almost twice as fast when compared to the original beta version.

Touch Screen Input from Back of the device

Ever wondered how people with big hands or wider fingers can type or click on the icons on the touchscreen device?
Ever faced issues with playing games on a touch screen device like iPhone/Omnia and getting irritated because your own fingers are blocking your view of the screen?

Not sure if the designers really thought about it when designing the touch screen devices. For Ex: There are lots of people who complain that iPhone does not come with a stylus and its difficult to type the characters with bare fingers.

With technology going smarter day by day and people growing fatter day by day, we need some technology which can not just make the gadgets smaller but provide a better usability as well.

The answer to this is here. Its a budding technology which was showcased during the recent Techfeast 2009, where in you provide input on the back of the device and see the screen in the front. Confused? its very simple. Instead of moving you fingers on the touch screen itself, move your fingers on the back of the device and see the movement being recognised and the action being performed in your device. This way you don't make your fingers block your view of the screen.



The idea is very nice, but need to wait and watch to see if people will get accustomed to the devices with this technology and how well it goes into the day to day usage.

Windows Live - Search for Cashback Products Only

Q. Is there any best way to look for the products that have a cashback offer?

Ans: Yes, there is a place on the net for this and its none other than Windows Live Search. Live Search the only search tool from Microsoft has a cool feature to search for just the products which have a "cashback" offer!

If you go the Live Search site, there you will see a small link at the top right corner which says "cashback", Click on it and it takes you to a page with the list of top cashback offers. Search for any product starting from something like "Shoes" to something like "Notebooks" and "Netbooks".

To know more about how it works, look here.

UPDATE: While searching online using any of the search engines (viz, Yahoo!, Google, Live Search), there is a easier way to find if there is a cashback for the product being searched or not without even searching in Live Search, but if you have MSN Toolbar installed.

MSN Toolbar detects the search being done and shows a icon in the toolbar saying "cashback" and takes you to the cashback page with details. This is very useful feature, but its not available on Windows Live Toolbar. I guess its high time for Microsoft to integrate these toolbars into one.
(Thanks Aaron for these details)

Vision Montage 2019 from Microsoft

Microsoft as always has come up with some great ideas not for next release of Windows or Office, this time its for the future called "Future Vision Montage". Microsoft Office Labs has come up with a series of videos showcasing how the future 2019 can be.

An interesting thing here is, all the articles or videos till now used to feature people or language from US, UK, Japan, China, etc... this time they have included India and Hindi. The video shows the word Water ( Paani ) and students across the globe talk in their language using the transparent-translator wall.

The video looks very cool. The power point presentation of the same can be found here.