Google’s acquires Jotspot, targets the WIKI

Google does it again and this time it has a different target - the WIKI. Google corp has taken over JotSpot, the first ever company to provide a wiki application for an enterprise based solution. Its been just than a week ago that Google captured the video blogging arena with the takeover of YouTube making its arms spreading its market even more in the various blogging communities. Google has made a strong web presence in its 8 years of existence by means of hosted applications which caters to the variety of internet consumers. Following the same strategy of expanding its territory over the web it has now targeted the pending zone of knowledge sharing community.

Knowledge sharing applications like wikipedia have been capturing a heavy number of internet users for sharing and maintaining information of various sorts using the concept of global collaboration. Gartner has predicted that 50% of a corporation will adopt Wikis as mainstream collaboration tools by 2009 which in earlier times had been restricted to file sharing, emails, Content management systems, etc. But in recent times, the wiki has won the bout due to the simplicity it provides to the users with the absolute separation of UI and the data. It targets primarily the users who may or may not be web aware but can provide the system with some information. Graham Spence, founder of JotSpot, has stated in the official google blog that his dream of knowledge management with collaboration on a global scale will become even more widely accepted with the joint venture with Google corp while providing the same amount of privacy as they maintained.

The main advantage of Jotspot giving in to Google will be the availability of the plethora of tools already under Google’s belt which would help Jotspot to provide more rich features considering the advancement of the internet to the user rich experience of web 2.0. But considering Google’s inherent sharing of data to its various web tools will the private information of an organisition on a hosted server like Jotspot remain secure enough and whether industries who have adopted to use wiki’s as their premier information management tools in their own confines by a local collaboration wiki-behind-the-firewall suite like Confluence provided by Atlassian will move to the Google-Jotspot based wiki in future.

Review - Mozilla Firefox 2.0

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Guruji.com - India’s answer to Google ?

India is leading today in the terms of IT services it provides globally. It may be sometimes misleading to stereotype India as a outsourcing sector in the IT industry rather than a product maker. There may be a few products which Indian IT firms have managed to produce but these have caused significant changes in the market only to be taken over by the IT giants. India’s stride in the development zone might bring up some enthusiasm amongst Indian technicians who flock abroad for search of such oppurtunities.

The students of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) have now tied up thier seat belts to get prepared to carry on a big fight or maybe enter a race where its competitors have reached the brink of perfection. Guruji.com, India’s first search engine has gone live on October 12, 2006. Its primarily in its beta stage and proves to cater to the Indian audience which I feel is a nice take as trying to be global in the first step would have been slight dampening as its success would be straightway measured to the likes of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc. But taking on the Indian look Guruji provides a strict policy of bringing you the pages solely belonging to India. It even asks for feedback if you encountered a page which was not Indian. Guruji.com is backed by Sequoia Capital India (which eventually provided venture capital for Google, Yahoo!, Paypal, Electronic Arts, YouTube, Ometric, Insider Pages ) with a $7 million funding which seems very much encouraging for the efforts going to be put into making Guruji.com a big success.

I tried a rather hard comparision on this 14 day old Guruji to the 8 year old Google. The search key I chose was “diwali“. The results proved pretty interesting. Google’s Indian Pages searched 11,60,000 in 0.13 seconds while Guruji returned 2,20,239 results (time not mentioned, but was faster than Google’s) put into a ratio of about 5:1. Then I searched for “Infosys” in which google returned 3,19,00 pages in 0.2 sec while Guruji returned 1,00,645 pages put into a ratio of about 3:1.

Being a 14 day old search engine and bringing about 3:1 ratio results (almost similar in relevance) is a good news for the IIT students and Indians alike for such future innovations within the country. The thing to watch out for would be whether it would be able to attain success in the Indian market like Google.

Experiencing Mozilla Thunderbird

I never had used Microsoft’s Outlook Express as I did not like using a POP account locally as I thought that it might hinder the performance of my network due to bandwidth consumption. I still do, nevertheless I wanted to try out a POP account access at some point of time so decided to give it a go. Besides gmail takes a lot of time to open in my browser. I have a gmail account and to my surprise, it already has an option to enable POP access to the email access.

I am a frantic user of Mozilla Firefox so decided to use Thunderbird 1.5.0.2 Mail Client rather than going on to Outlook just for the heck of it. And hey, it’s damn simple!! Gmail provides a complete step by step procedure for configuring Thunderbird with its POP and SMTP servers and within minutes I was reading and composing mails from within Thunderbird.

The cheesiest thing about using Mozilla Thunderbird which I later found to my pleasant surprise was that Firefox automatically gets integrated with Thunderbird and you would be able to access Thunderbird from within Firefox. Furthermore I can now configure my Yahoo account also in it. Firefox provides the most wanted facility for me i.e accessing syndications from blogs I frquently visit.

So checking mails or blogs now doesnt require any more waiting for your page to load.  Just log intoThunderBird and have fun!!

New Flickr account

It’s real fun to capture some of the amazing glimpses which you see and while they last and then show them to your near and dear one’s. It definitely puts a expression worth noting on their faces be it happy, shockes, awed, or sadness. Really ! a picture is worth a thousand words and who would not like to save precious time and money in putting to text the expressions rather than showing the thing exactly embedded in your eyes!! Its really amazing experience.As promised after the enigmatic purchase of my new cell phone the brand new Sony Ericsson W810i a.k.a Neo featuring an amazing quality 2 Mega Pix camera that I would be uploading the pics here. But when someone else is providing a good service of photo management I thought why not put it to good use. Thats when FLICKR came to the rescue and I am using it to its fullest!

I tried the Flickr extension Pickup for Firefox 1.5.0.7 but that seems too heavy for my machine. So currenltly trying out Flickr’s own tool Uploader beta and that seems just fine. All I have to do is drag n drop the photos in it and uploading is done as a background process. So I guess it wont take long when soon Ill be joining the league of photographers world wide for some nice capturing business. Right now its more amaeturish but what difference does it make.? I am making my statements more clearer through some Clicks !!

Say Bon Jour to my Flickr here .

Review - BEA Aqualogic Data Services Platform

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Review - Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 RC1

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“Bid Adeiu” www.nitinpai.net

Finally the time has arrived for a eye watering farewell to my dear web site www.nitinpai.net which was gifted to me a year. The time had started to tick by as I had received a mail in my gmail account stating for a renewal for the domain for $7.50. I had in mind untill some months ago to renew the registration but as I got introduced to www.wordpress.com my thoughts were never the same. I got addicted to wordpress that I stopped blogging at my 2 year old blog at www.nitin2005.blogspot.com . The managment dashboard, the importing of my old posts, the themes, the page sections, the categories provided by wordpress is everything I ever wanted to have and the experience made me to forget my own site where I used to put in the updates in my life and my learnings. But as I dont it too much, I am thinking of not renewing it and the date of expiry is November 20, 2006 on which all the contents in my web site would vanish and people who had bookmarked it would only be able to find it in the Google server’s cache. It was the one thing which had marked my presence on the web and in my workplace, but now with wordpress I have marker presence all over the world as I daily get some or the other responses. Its the best I must say and for my dying site its “So long”!!!

Open vs Proprietary Standards

I was quite irritated while reading this point in a post on ajaxian

The kind of rich interactivity that Flash and Windows Presentation Foundation provide are going to be leaps and bounds ahead of what any browser technology can do, and that’s why they will succeed. The web becomes richer every day.Ajax applications can’t take advantage of them in the way the Flash or WPF can.

The web, as we see today has evolved massively in terms of its interactivity is all because of the open standards. DHTML, CSS and now AJAX have made it more and more acceptable and the developers community have strived to make it all the more reusable and easier to maintain by providing libraries, frameworks.

CSS now as we advocate its use over the older designs through the use of table elements is only becuase CSS is an open standard. Had it been proprietary then the web would have been hampered in its stead fast growth. I have read about SVG and have a strong feeling than it would not take much time to grow and capture the web as AJAX today.

I support people who make technology available for the benefit of the world and its refinement rather than making the world come to them asking for it. The web is growing beyond imagination considering RSS feeds, XHTML standards for cross browser compatibilty, XML-SOAP for enterprise application interoperability, wiki’s etc.

People would only be able to enjoy and reap the benefits of these technologies if and only if we accept more open standards  and enhance it in the form of communities. Moreover open standards have a global reach as they do not need anything outside the normal resources. This makes a developer’s initiative all the more successful and his efforts to achieve success faster.

Microsoft’s Live Search

There were the days when you opened Internet Explorer and typed in any word in the address bar, IE would look for the keyword in msn explorer and try to find the relevant matches. Then came in Google with its simplistic form of a search engine and took over the world by large and people started configuring their browsers to point to www.google.com as their default page or search engine. Even today, if you ask some net surfers, which other search engines they know other than Google’s, they would seem confused, as if Google was the only one. Of course there are many including msn, yahoo, etc. but none beat the speed and relevance of Google’s search engine.

Then came in the AJAX and the web suddenly seemed to give faster responses to users needs and search engines tried to incorporate this so as to give Google a run for its money. How could Microsoft have been left behind in this run !!. A few months ago it had entered the league in revolutionizing the web with its simulation of a web desktop at www.live.com . But I guess it always had its eye on the success of Google and leaving behind the web desktop development it started to concentrate more on its search engine and AJAX wizardry.

Now if you take a look at www.live.com , it would no more be a web desktop demo coz its been christened to a AJAX search engine!! (named as the LIVE SEARCH). So the next time if you type in a keyword in the address bar of the Internet Explorer and hit Enter, don’t be surprised if Microsoft redirects IE to www.live.com and searches for it!! But even with AJAX Microsoft is way behind in its timings compared to GOOGLE. The thing which remains to be compared is the relevance.