Category: Technology

The first time I read the news about Google’s new browser I was quite surprised. Does the world need another browser? Isn’t Google backing Firefox in a BIG way? Then, I read this and came away rather impressed at how technology can be explained so “nicely.”

So, I decided to give Chrome a test drive.

Quick Summary

• The first noticeable feature is the speed. It installs very quickly, is light-weight and launches rather fast. Very impressive indeed.
• The pop-up blocker is the best I have seen. Even the annoying pop-ups at the TOI site were blocked successfully.
• The UI is uncluttered. Gone are the RSS feeds (which I miss!) and the custom toolbars (good riddance!).
• The URL field and the search fields are merged into one and the tabs have been moved to that top of the screen. This takes some getting used to, especially if you thrive on tabs.
• Each tab operates independently, so if one of the tabs are hung you can kill it and use the rest without having to restart the entire browser. This is probably the most attractive feature after the speed of the browser.
• If you are more technically inclined the browser lets you see the memory usage of each tab.
• Chrome is search engine neutral.
• The current version of Chrome works only on Windows.

Desktop Icons

The various web apps (Google Apps, Gmail etc.) can be saved as desktop icons and can subsequently be opened like a regular, normal application as apposed to being opened through the browser like a web application. Kinda cool.

Would Google Chrome eat up market share from other browsers?

Probably, to a certain extent. Personally, I can’t see myself abandoning Firefox and IE 6, at least not for now. Like many, I use multiple computers. One of them has Google Chrome installed, more out of curiosity rather than a pressing need. As far as I can tell, there is no compelling reason to move to Chrome (unless you are tech junkie), at least not yet.

What is the future of Chrome?

It will be interesting to see where Google goes with this product in the future, particularly because there is no compelling need to move to Chrome in its current form. I suspect there is more exciting technology in the pipeline (on the web apps front) and the present-day Chrome is only scratching the surface of what is possible with the new approach to the browser.

The fact that it is completely open source is certainly in sync with Google’s “do no evil” motto and might spurn some innovation from the Open Source community.

Given that Google has a war chest of cash, its engineers can endlessly amuse themselves with cool new technologies (good for them!). But it remains to be seen if there is a revenue model (either direct or in-direct) of some sort lurking somewhere in the distant future. Or is Google simply trying to steal some of Microsoft’s IE 8.0 thunder?

Like many Google products, the Chrome is one more product that is high on the “coolness” factor.

Web application developers have one more headache to deal with — Testing for one more browser and its various flavors!

p.s: Btw, I used Google Chrome to download IE 8.0. My first impression was that it still feels a lot like IE 7.0. So I promptly unistalled it given that I hardly got to like IE 7.0. When I first tried to uninstall IE 7.0 (and return to IE 6.) it was a complete nightmare. So maybe IE 8.0 is not bad, after all 🙂

Pick a vertical, sign up a top VC investor, create some buzz, generate traffic, and eventually cash out (hopefully) by selling to one of the larger more established companies. Is this just me or have the dot com days returned? Are the days of the first mover advantage back? Revenues don’t matter anymore? Monetizing eyeballs is a challenge for the future? Registered users are more important than business models? This was the formula in the dotcom days. It sure sounds like we are back in that kinda game again. Web 2.0’s poster child Mark Zuckerberg exemplified this mindset when he said recently (when asked about revenue generation), “We’ll figure that out later.” (Yikes! Maybe its time to read Net Gain again? ) Top VC firms appear to be backing this model once again inspired by the sale of Youtube, Flickr, Skype, Writely, Jotspot, Blogger (to name a few), all of which had no revenue model so to speak.

Avvo a community site for lawyers and those in search of legal services is one more company that expects to make money from ads. And of course, the rest “they’ll figure it out later”.

All of this being said, I love the idea behind Avvo.

The legal industry in the US is one vertical that has long been ignored and is desperately overdue for some disruptive changes – technological or otherwise. To some level legal outsourcing has started to happen but the actual use of the internet/technology to reduce legal costs hasn’t really materialized on a large scale. In a highly litigious country like the US where there is always a huge demand for legal services one would expect the cost of legal services to at least drop over time. Unfortunately, I have found this has never to be the case. Every year big law firm routinely sends out annual rate increase letters like doling out New Year cards. Top of the line corporate lawyers charge over $700 per hour! These rates are outright ridiculous especially when the tasks involved most often are no rocket science. The bulk of the legal work especially for startups, are very routine, mundane paper work. Unfortunately, these services are billed by the hour and prior effort estimates seldom work in the legal industry. (Because there are no yes or no answers, it is always “It depends”). Moreover, the time spent on email, phone calls, even photo-copying — every second is technically charged to client. How insane is that?

So without a doubt Avvo’s service is valuable. Its free (so far). You can search the database for answers to your queries, you can find lawyers, their ratings, you can post questions and get them answered by lawyers, etc. At a minimum this service will get some lawyers to respond to some queries for free in the hope of boosting their ratings and their business! Could you post your queries on LinkedIn and get a response? You certainly can. But the odds in Avvo are supposedly higher because it is a dedicated community unlike LinkedIn, Plaxo, Yahoo Answers etc.

Avvo seems to have a great PR engine going for it (NY Times, Techcrunch, Venturebeat etc have all covered the company at various times) like most dotcom companies. It seems to have also picked up investments from top VCs. It remains to be seen if Avvo can sustain the buzz, grow its traffic and ultimately park itself with one of the “biggies” for some mega bucks.

From a purely business standpoint, Avvo’s approach is not new. In theory, the same idea can apply to doctors, dentists, accountants, teachers, tutors, schools, you name it. Put all these verticals together and you have a Web 2.0 version of “Vertical Net” (or one of the many ghosts of the dot com days. “Exchange” was the buzzword in those days). The problem is that lawyers, accountants, doctors, etc. are usually picked with an eye towards a long term relationship. This also means that most people are strongly influenced and rely almost entirely on personal recommendations from those closely known to them. For the one-off services in the legal field, the legalzooms of the world perform a perfectly acceptable service and good value for money. So its a mystery as to where Avvo fits in to this spectrum and what secret sauce if any it has cooking. At the moment for all its value and good intentions Avvo is firmly in the Zuckerberg school of revenue generation. Given all the buzz behind Facebook, one can’t exactly fault them for it. Can you?

Disclaimer: I have nothing against lawyers. In fact, most lawyers I have met and/or have been fortunate to interact with are very very smart people. If they made a little less money, they might spur some innovations as startups will have more $ to work with! 🙂

I attended Linuxworld this week for the first time. I wandered around the expo floor and also took a peak at a session or two. In fact, it was my first ever visit to a Linux conference. I must admit I was underwhelmed by the response. Frankly, I expected a better turn out and more enthusiasm. Instead I found it to be pretty low key.

The big wigs like IBM, Oracle and others were present probably to reinforce their commitment to open source . The were others like Haiku (the ghost of BeOS), VMware, OpenSuSE, One laptop per child (the struggling education project), Joomla, and Drupal (open source CMS) Zmanda for automated backups (they were using a Windows PC in the booth – sacrilege!), Opsview and Groundwork for Monitoring, among others. Here are a few others that stood out for me among the many exhibitors.

GoGrid for Cloud computing

This is an interesting company going head on against Amazon’s EC2. Check out a comparison table against EC2. The good news is that this company is dedicated to this business (starting with its parent company Servepath) unlike Amazon which treats EC2 as a side activity. (If you have ever tried reaching EC2 support you’ll know exactly what I mean).

KickApps (interesting social media)

This is an interesting web 2.0 social media product. If you are looking to build out your own community (say for your blog, company website etc.) with the ability to have groups, video upload, photos and the works, this could be a nice extension to what you already have in place. While the final output does look great and is loaded with functionality, one can’t help but wonder where this fits in along with the scores of other “community type” products. They have free and a usage based fee versions.

gOS (a slick, really really, pretty Linux on the desktop)

The gOS is a desktop Liunx (based on Ubuntu Linux) whose UI looks really pretty. On tiny PCs they look really cute to say the least. This OS was on the Everex gPC which was apparently sold out at Wal-Mart for $199. Essentially if you want use the PC for browsing, email etc. and can live with Open Office, this could do the job. Here is another one that is similar but offers you some cool premium features of a true WebOS.

Open Voting Initiative (Linux based voting machines)

There were voting machines based on Open Source technologies on display. Considering that the US is headed for another possibly close Presidential race maybe Open Source is the answer to the counting woes of Florida and the like.

It is a simple display where you click through a list of choices to cast your vote and at the end of it you get print out listing your vote all bult on standard PC architecture running Ubuntu Linux. For more information check out — Open Voting Consortium

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)

I had read so much about the One laptop per child initiative and its troubles. For the first time I got a chance to see the machine. I must say I was disappointed to say the least. It feels like a cheap Chinese imported toy. I could still live with that if it was genuinely easy to use. But unfortunately I found most adults (including myself) struggling to use it. Maybe this is designed for kids and they can figure it out, or maybe its just me. Despite the most noble intentions behind this project and with all due respect, I can’t see this being widely used by kids.

Summary

I am not sure where this conference lies in the “pecking order” of Linux conferences but the attendance was far from impressive. (As per reports Linuxworld 2003 had 19,000 attendees!). If crowds are a metric to go by one can’t help but sense that the excitement about Linux (at least as far as conferences are concerned) has started to wear out though there could be a number of factors like over dose of Linux conferences, the downturn, etc. affecting the turn out. In any case, before you beat me down with your comments please read my disclaimer at the end of this post).

p.s: The Linux Journal magazine had a balanced and interesting article (registration required) by an educator who switched his school to Linux from Microsoft back in 2002.

Disclaimer: I have nothing against Linux. In fact, I have recently become a regular active user of Linux Mint. This post is an attempt to capture my impressions of the conference from a brief visit. Any errors in this post are probably a reflection of my personal limitations rather than those of Linuxworld or those of Linux lovers around the globe.

There is little doubt that Google has a virtual monopoly over search and search based advertising. Even the mighty Microsoft is running helter-skelter trying to mount at least a challenge to Google.

The WSJ reported today about a bay area startup – Cuil, Inc.

Cuil said it won’t collect personal information about its users, such as the addresses of their computers and their individual search histories — although it does track the terms people search for overall. While all major search engines have taken steps to cut back on the time they store data related to individual searchers and to make the data more anonymous, Ms. Patterson said Cuil can stop collecting information about individuals’ behavior altogether because its algorithms rely more heavily on analyzing the content of a particular Web page than on the popularity of the page.

This is a refreshing change from the privacy concerns that hound Google from time to time.  One can finally search without being watched! Secondly, there is something really nice about the way Cuil displays its results. There are no ads, plus the display is a welcome change from the long boring list the Google and other conventional search engines offer.

There was a report in the Businessweek a few weeks back about a Russian search engine named Yandex ,  that was giving Google a run for its money in Russia.

Yandex handles 55% of local language search queries in Russia. Its closest rival is Rambler , another Russian company, with a 17% share, followed by Google with 15%, according to research site LiveInternet.ru.

Surely, there has to be some inherent advantages for search engines that factor local, cultural and other behavioral aspects to develop custom search engines targeted for specific countries around the world (especially non-English speaking).

Another search engine based out of India, named, Guruji recently announced music specific search . In a country like India where films and music are a huge industry this makes a lot of sense.

In general, its great to see more activity in the search space. Whether its Microsoft at the high end with the deep pockets or start-ups, its about time Google had some credible competitors at least at the local level if not on a global scale.

I had read and heard so much about how Linux has improved over the years. I have also been endlessly postponing my plan  to take Linux on a test drive with no help whatsoever. Recently, I came across Linux Mint and decided I was going to take the plunge.

Installation

I downloaded Linux Mint , then I "burnt" it on a CD (not copy it on to a CD) and went through the installation process on a regular Windows PC. The CD took me through the steps of partitioning my hard drive (so I could still maintain my Windows installation) . The User Interface during the partition process was a little tricky. It was not obvious how to allocate the size of the partition. After a while I figured out that the sizing is done by a simple drag operation using the mouse.

The claim is that you can run Linux Mint from the CD to get a feel for it before installing it. But I found this to be unacceptably slow on most machines (especially older PCs).

Applications

Linux Mint comes with all the basic programs Firefox 3 , Open Office , Thunderbird for email etc. already pre-installed. Open Office fires up really fast unlike on a PC where I find it "dog slow".

Installing new programs is not the easiest. I for one struggled to install flash! I downloaded and assumed that a simple double click would do it. But it wasn’t as straight forward. I had to eventually save flash in the ~/mozilla/plugins directory (try figuring that one out on your own!).

Taking screen shots is done using the pre-installed GIMP Image Editor. I got to this program fairly easily but figuring out how to take a screen shot using it wasn’t as easy as Ctrl-Alt-Print screen in the Windows environment.

The software named Wine helps you run Windows applications on a PC. It does not work with Office 2007. Besides, I found configuring it to be not so straightforward.

You don’t need to install PDF. There is a pre-installed Document Viewer that opens up PDF documents. Open Office lets you write out PDF documents but I wouldn’t risk that for "official" documents, especially those with serious formatting (like Table of Contents etc.).

User Interface

The UI is pretty and pleasing. If you are a long time Windows XP user (like most people on this planet), getting used to the UI should be fairly easy though it could take some time, especially if you don’t posses  "nerd-like" tendencies somewhere deep inside of you. The ability to access remote servers via the Internet, mount and unmount them and access the files and folders is really easy (most average users don’t need this).

A Few Suggestions

• The Filter feature should be made a little smarter. When you search for something that’s not obvious it opens up a dumb blank screen instead of something like "Were you looking for ….?" At a minimum it should display the Help files instead of a lame blank screen. Even typing in "Help" returns the same blank screen!

• I have never been able to find the "Help" files. This should not be a big secret!

• When I go into Hibernate mode it displays a message about not having enough "swap space" and that I should look into the Help files (which I can’t seem to find). I am sure I can figure this out with some effort. The reality is that most average users won’t have the time or the patience for this.

• The audio stops working every time I return from suspend mode. I realized later that it was a known problem with a crazy hack available. This is an essential feature and should not be a "known problem".

Who is Linux Mint most suited to?

If you are a developer (developing web applications on non-MS platform) you could very easily survive with a PC running Linux Mint. In other words, a Windows PC would be a complete waste for a developer. Employers can save the extra investment in Windows when buying a PC for a developer. It gives users the pleasure of a terminal and command line interface along with a nice UI if they ever care for one. Installing the latest versions of PHP, PERL, MySQL and the like is a breeze.

On the other hand, if you are a sales, administrative and marketing type, you most likely live and breath MS Office. For such users it is a little too scary to abandon MS Office for Open Office or run MS Office on Linux using Wine . For example, if you are sending a proposal in MS-Word to a customer, most people I suspect wouldn’t want to risk writing it in Open Office, Google Docs or the like.

If you are one of those users who has multiple computers, and are open to a little experimentation, then Linux Mint can be a good addition to the mix.

In short, the Linux Mint is still very much a developers’ system first. Considering that it’s development is an entirely voluntary effort, this observation should not be a surprise. I am not sure if Linux Mint is tested with non-techies (at least non-developers) before it is released. If not, this would be a worthwhile step towards improving its overall usability.

Summary

My personal experience tells me that with some pain, pretty much anything that you can do on a Windows PC can be done today on a machine running Linux Mint (minus MS Office and not counting Open Office). For instance, I was able to get my printer, scanner and audio working on Linux Mint. I was also able to print using a wireless connection from a Windows PC onto the printer connected to the machine running Linux Mint, among other things.

Every time you run into a problem, it takes time to figure things out. In fact, it often requires serious patience and perseverance. The good news is that there is plenty of information available around the web. The bad news is that the average user is not ready for this kind of torture, though, after the initial "getting used to" phase things should be pretty smooth sailing especially if you are open to running web applications and need the machine mostly to send and receive email, browse etc.

The tag line for Linux Mint is "From Freedom Came Elegance". While it is certainly elegant it does carry with it some pain (some might say severe pain or other might even call it misery!) in the form of a learning curve, and problems  while installing basic applications as I experienced. On the other hand, a few years back I could not have imagined being able to install Linux and use it on a day to day basis without external help. Today, I am able to do it and I believe so can many other users. At a minimum, Linux Mint in its current form is a definite sign of progress for the open source movement but it still has ways to go before it can attract the average user. Further improving the ease of use (I don’ mean making it prettier), and being able to easily run Windows applications would certainly help this cause (Wine or its equivalent must be easier to configure at a minimum).

Trivia : Try playing Stick cricket (an online cricket game in flash) on Linux Mint and then on a Windows PC. The speed on Linux Mint is simply blazing in comparison!

Disclaimer : My adventures with Linux Mint is purely a personal endeavor. Any problem outlined here might be a personal limitation and not necessarily that of Linux Mint.

Of late there have been a host of articles about an “overdose of the Internet” in general. I am not sure which of these articles/posts started it all but here is a list of a few that I came across over the last few weeks and snippets from them. Maybe its a sign that many are being gripped by an overdose of the Net? Fundamental questions are starting to be asked about the long term implications of browsing and its impact on productivity?

According to market research firm comScore, in May the total number of Internet searches conducted in the U.S. alone was about 10.7 billion — up nearly 20 percent from 9.1 billion searches in May 2007 (got this data from GigOm ). In other words, more and more people are relying on the net to do things and the rest of the world is soon going to follow suit.

Is Google Making Us Stupid? (article in the The Atlantic)

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. What’s Google Doing to our minds? (Related article in the Mercury News)

Lost in Email, Tech Firms Face Self-made Beasts (NY Times)

A typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times, according to one measure by RescueTime, a company that analyzes computer habits. The company, which draws its data from 40,000 people who have tracking software on their computers, found that on average the worker also stops at 40 Web sites over the course of the day.

Let’s take a holiday from Net (Mercury News)

Lessig is a who in “Who’s Who,” a scholar who’s crusaded against overprotective copyrights, promoted Net neutrality and agitated for good government. He’s a Stanford law professor who regularly speaks at the world’s big think-fests. He’s a rock star among the digerati, a blogger (of course) who recently decided against a run for Congress.

And despite it all, once a year he makes a deliberate decision to go off the digital grid – no blogging, limited e-mail, few phone calls – for a month.

Official announcement regarding my retirement from blogging (Blog post)

“It’s with a heavy heart, and much consideration, that today I would like to announce my retirement from blogging.” Jason McCabe Calacanis, July 11th 2008. He raises some interesting points about why he switched to a mailing list from blogging.

I agree with most of these articles. In fact, some ground rules might be overdue. Adults who have easy access to the Net will do well to set aside “browsing time” much like TV watching time and adhere to it. “No email ” days at work are likely to become more common place and less of an experiment. Children would do well to get on the net at a later age rather than sooner . I have other ideas in mind too. But, frankly, I didn’t think you’d make it this far on this post 🙂 If you are reading this sentence you are probably in good shape and don’t need to worry about the net having adverse effects on your ability to concentrate. Congratulations!

Firefox 3 has been released recently with a lot of fanfare as usual — Record breaking downloads , data about increasing market share , the admiration and praise for the open source movement, among other things.

I have been an active user of Firefox ever since its launch. IE 6.0 was great but IE 7.0 was awful. Thus my preference for Firefox has been further strengthened over the years. So when Firefox 3.0 was released I promptly downloaded it and started to use it. Here are a few of my observations.

Memory problem is still very much there

I was hoping that in this release the memory issue will be addressed. Though I have read claims about the fix, I didn’t see it working first hand on Windows XP. I find that Firefox 3 hogs memory (as you add tabs) and then suddenly freezes. Once this occurs, “killing” the browser window is quite a struggle. Firefox 2 is more stable and reliable in this regard. This is easily the biggest Firefox 3.0 weakness in my opinion. It happened to me too frequently to be ignored despite the fact that I usually open no more than 4-5 tabs.

Saving Login/Password does not work, sometimes

I noticed this problem on the Meebo site. Despite checking the box that says remember me, you have to enter your password every single time. This works just fine in Firefox 2.0. (This maybe a problem with Meebo rather than the browser?)

Saving the tabs is very useful

If you accidentally delete a tab, the History menu maintains the recently deleted tabs, making it so much easier to recover deleted tabs. In Firefox 2 you had to install a plugin to do this for you.

Cool Address Bar

As always there are cool features to excite the technically inclined. The coolest of these being the address bar. If you visit a site frequently you can just enter the site name instead of the entire URL. The browser maintains this information. In short, its cool and saves you some typing.

Look and Feel of IE

Firefox fans are not going to like this. Firefox 3.0 has an IE 7.0 feel to it. By this I don’t mean specific UI features. I mean the overall feel. There is a certain “lightness” to it which reminds one of IE 7.0. It will be interesting to see Microsoft return with IE 8.0 later this year.

You can read a full list of new Firefox 3.0 features here . There is no question that Firefox 3.0 is easily far ahead of IE 7.0 in its usability.

Finally, Some Serious food for thought

Here is a snippet from a recent article in the Mercury News.

The code for the latest version of the browser received contributions from about 800 folks, only a fraction of whom are employed by Mozilla. And thousands more people download daily updates to the beta versions to test and critique them.

Mozilla funds all this primarily through money it gets from a revenue-share agreement with Google for searches conducted through the browser. The balance comes from contributions from its community and foundations. In the most recent year of financial data available, Mozilla had revenue of $66,840,850 in 2006 compared with expenses of $19,776,193. It paid 90 people in some fashion that year to work on Firefox.

Statements like the above just spread the myth that Firefox is all non-profit and we are living in this great new world where an army of strangers come together for the common good of computer users around the globe. While there might be some element of truth to it, the reality though is that there is the Mozilla Corporation (which is for-profit) while the Mozilla Foundation is non-profit. The for-profit organization rakes in the moolah and pays its CEO (500K+ in annual salary) and other executives big bucks. 90-odd people who work on the project are hopefully well-paid as well while the 800-odd out there get little or nothing in return (besides some recognition, possibly some web presence and maybe a couple of T-shirts).

Most of Mozilla’s revenues come from its advertising arrangement with Google. The Firefox browser with a growing market share is a direct challenge to Microsoft’s IE. Under these circumstances, it is hard to argue against claims that Mozilla is no more than a front for Google’s in its battle against Microsoft. Frankly, it is surprising that Microsoft is not doing more to dispel this myth about Mozilla.

A cash rich organization like Mozilla would do well to monetarily recognize those 800-odd (starving?) developers around the world. Next, the media should stop spreading this myth about Mozilla’s non-profit status.

Last but not the least, the Mozilla should be forced to explicitly outline the distinction between its for-profit and non-profit entities instead of high falutin’ statements on its website like “We’re a public benefit organization dedicated not to making money but to improving the way people everywhere experience the Internet” and “In the end, the Mozilla community, organization and technology is all focused on a single goal: making the Internet better for everyone.”

The Mozilla website in its current form helps further this myth that sections of the media seem to be spreading already. This is wrong, unfair, and blatantly misleading, though I still love the Firefox browser.