Global Sync

In connection to my previous blog on GDesktop or GInternet.

As we move ahead in the digital world, we will be using more & more digital devices. Today one's office PC, home PC, Laptop, Mobile Phone, PDA act as local data syncs. Then there are resources from multiple service providers on the internet where one's data lives.

The amount of data that we are personally generating is increasing tremendously and as we move ahead its bound to grow bigger & bigger. Mobile phone cameras combined with blogging have already started making an impact in this direction.

In such a scenario, finding even personal information will become a challenge. Google has shown that one can search efficiently in a highly distributed environment by making it centralized very efficiently. The information on which we work personally, has to also lie on the network and the local hard discs, memory data chips will just act like a temporary cache which automatically gets synced back to the network.

For this to happen, we need to look at the Storage Vs Connectivity. Though storage costs have decreased tremendously and memory chips now form a part of wide variety of devices from watches, microwaves and every other device on which one can put hand on. But connectivity hasn't yet become seamless. To have a significant effect for next generation of digital era, connectivity must become as pervasive as memory chips are today where every digital chip is always connected to a network.

And services like google or any other service provider can then make data syncs of personal information on the network from any device. Privacy issues can be handled upto some extent via having encryption technologies, the way unix passwords are stored. Data is synced at the server, but in a secure fashion where like a unix password an administrator or a service provider can't interpret the data.

The next step would be then to apply adaptable techniques to be able to retrieve data in an adaptable fashion depending on the environment.

GDesktop or GInternet

The title tells it all. Is google going into the desktop space or establishing a wider brand over the internet? Or will the desktop span inside the internet? Or will it master both independently?

Google is slowly moving away from a pure search engine company to a services company where its getting more closer to user needs. The most common things that a user does on the internet are Email and Search. Google has got it both.

With an IPO coming forward, it must have huge plans for going forward.

Google does search on around 4.2 billion webpages which might be a fraction of the internet space. Google has very tactfully managed to work on that amount of data. The desktop data space might be quite huge as compared to the internet but can google master to have a small percentage of this space? A user is then no longer worried about losing his data ever. And google manages it efficiently and enables him to find it efficiently whenever he needs it.

Or will the google tools come closer to the desktop? And therefore one will have a number of tools for each of the multiple devices, a user uses. Or in a true ambient intelligence scenario, google can combine data from multiple data sources for an individual and enable it in the way a user wants, no matter wherever he is, which ever device he is using!

GMail - my first perspective

It was quite unexpected when yesterday while configuring my Blogger.com account I got an option to try a GMail account. I was always looking forward to get that. The day Google released GMail account for testing, I posted a message for getting an account. But then didn't get any reply back.

GMail not just only provides you tremendous space but also increases your efficiency. Google has kept its tradition of keeping the interface simple and focusing on functionalities.

There has been much hue & cry about the advertising procedure of google, but I don't see any specific reason which makes me feel negative about that. In my view they have actually created a sound business model based on which they can provide cheap(in this case free) services to large number of users and also earn revenue. And now its upto a user to decide weather he wants to use it or not.

The way advertisements appear along with the mail, doesn't block your view and don't make you feel itchy. The advertisements just appear once only during when one opens an email for reading. On the contrary email interfaces of other providers have a lot of flashy advertisements, pop ups which at times itch a lot.

GMail has made the response for the service quite fast and massively reduced the number of clicks for checking email. Overall its a quite good service, not just because of the 1G space, though its an important part but also in terms of the actual service.

the Degree Confluence Project

The goal of the project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures and stories are then posted on the project website.http://www.confluence.org/

Project Overview : snippets from the original website
The project is an organized sampling of the world. There is a confluence within 49 miles (79 km) of you if you're on the surface of Earth. We've discounted confluences in the oceans and some near the poles, but there are still 13,042 to be found.

History
I (Alex Jarrett) started the project in February 1996 because I liked the idea of visiting a location represented by a round number such as 43°00'00"N 72°00'00"W. What would be there? Would other people have recognized this as a unique spot? Another reason was that my friend managed to convince me to buy a GPS and I had to come up with something to do with it. I also hoped to encourage people to get outside, tromp around in places they normally would never go, and take pictures of it.

Project Stats
Primary confluences:
Successful visits: 4,048
Incomplete visits: 586
Unique successful: 3,122
Unique incomplete: 194
Percent complete: 19.31%
Total indexed: 16,164
Indexed - Land: 14,027
Indexed - Water: 1,986
Indexed - Ice Cap: 151

There are already more than 30,000 pictures from around 147 countries by around 4,800 people.
India has 290 confluence points of which only 53 have been covered till yet.. See map Any adventurous people around ?

Future of Search

An article at internetnews.com Future of Search Will Make you Dizzy'
By Ryan Naraine

That's the word from A9 chief executive Udi Manber, PhD, who insists that full development of search and resource discovery tools remains at least a decade away.

"Think about how the Web has changed your life in the last 10 years. Now, try to extrapolate 10 years forward and you should feel dizzy. We're still in day one of developing and innovating in search. There's still a lot of exciting discoveries to be made," Manber said in a keynote address at this year's World Wide Web (W3C) conference here.

"It's not about speed or size anymore. It's all about quality. It's about delivering the tools that allow relevancy. It's good to make searching faster and faster because that part is well understood. The quality part is not understood and that's the challenge we face today," he added.


Another article on internetnews.com mentions about projects at microsoft.

With the cost of data storage dropping to levels in which a terabyte of space will cost no more than $1,000, Rashid said the time will come when deleting data will be a thing of the past.

"There won't be reason for anyone to throw away any data," Rashid said. "We'll get to the stage where, for $1,000, you will be able to store more than a trillion bytes...More than enough space to store every conversation you have ever had, from the time you are born to the time you die."

With world becoming distributed and data lying not just on PC or web but mobile phones, future networked devices (networked iPod,..) and no delete button - the search wouldn't just imply searching web resources, but searching personal data quick, from any device and with quality results.

Top Level Domains .MOBI

Some of the companies are pushing hard to have .mobi domain for mobile devices. In one sense it is good for companies as well as users, as people on mobile devices if want to check cnn news, can go to www.cnn.mobi for instance. Finding a wap url for mobile web is a lot more complex today. That is one of the reasons why wap hasn't been able to take off as predicted.

But creating a .mobi domain will create a mad rush for companies with web url's today to have an equivalent .mobi domain. Moreover enforcing TLD's such as .mobi are good in short run, but in long term this will segment the web into small little webs where the mobile web is completely different from the pc web, which is to some extent the case today. Making .mobi domain will just aggravate the problem. What is needed is a mature technology which can make available the existing resources of the internet taking care the constraints of the mobile world.

An article on .mobi domain:.Mobi's Case For Mobile Domains

Closing on the Digital Divide

Developing economies like India face a tremendous challenge in bridging the digital divide. There's a wide gap amongst the rich & the poor and the literate & the illiterate. This is also hugely reflected by the poor PC penetration numbers that are amongst the lowest in the world.

The price levels, poor infrastructure pose huge challenges in the way of increasing these numbers. But more than the price, the real need of a PC for an individual is missing. A PC needs to become a utility like a refrigerator, television, radio or a washing machine where a user can see the need of a PC for himself. Currently a common man cannot find a significant reason to own a PC.

The applications of a PC define the utility for a PC. Internet has emerged as the most
hottest application of a PC amongst other applications such as the office tools or desktop games and the like. In the Indian context, the infrastructure for internet is poor, costly, no significant content and very few services available which an individual can make use of.

A Part of being digital is to have access to services passing on the benefits of technology and be able to change the way of living. I am trying to think of a two sided approach for bridging this gap. On the one side we need to decrease cost, improve infrastructure but more importantly also provide content & services which fulfills the need of an individual and affect his way of living.

Secondly to make use of the growing mobile world, where digital devices can be mobilised, even though these cannot provide a rich internet experience but can enable services which can impact the lives of people of bridging digital divide is to stress on mobile technology, data services, improve interfaces, technology and harness it to build a services infrastructure providing services which provides benefits of technology to the user.

The point for building this service infrastructure web is to provide services which a person can make use by himself without being dependent on anyone else. A fisherman when check himself about weather conditions from his mobile phone. Some one's father can buy a train ticket through a voice gateway. A person can have access to information that he needs.

Providing essential services which are usable reflecting a change in a common man's lifestyle will be a significant step forward in this direction. Without building this significant utility, mere increase in penetration numbers is much like running a literacy campaign where an illiterate person who can read/write his name is considered literate even though he is still ignorant and is still left aloof from the benefits of literacy.

RSS NeXT

RSS and blogging is slowly taking the internet by storm. One can see the orange icons providing RSS feeds on a number of websites (Yahoo, BBC) today. Companies are inventing ways to make use of RSS feeds. As more people move towards RSS, RSS readers and enabling technologies will become a major utility for accessing content.

Today RSS feeds are published mainly in the way a publisher provides them. They reflect the way a particular publisher publishes content, much like the content they publish on their respective website. RSS aggregators mere aggregate these feeds and provide only a basic search facility. As the number of RSS feeds increase, a user will be faced with the same daunting task of which information to see and when? RSS just moves the information overload problem to the next level.

As we move ahead with RSS embracing semantic web technologies, software programs will become a lot more sophisticated. These should be able to aggregate and provide specific content to the users according to their needs, interests and context.

What is needed is a more sophisticated service, which not only just provides a user accurate information, but prioritizes it, provides recommendations, enables sharing of ideas with other like minded people acting like a shared memory and is personalised. A service which could very easily link up an individual's interests with the vast resources available on the internet irrespective of the user's environment.

Indian Elections May 2004

Normally I personally try to keep away from politics like many other young people who think indian politics to be full of corruption. There are no role models and no one to look forward too. Even if at the national level there might be some people, the small constituencies are just empty.

But still I have casted my vote, twice in the last few years. I think when democracy gives us so much - which we take for granted - we must as citizens of a democracy play our role of keeping that democracy intact.

The election results have shocked most indians including me. It never looked that Congress could return to power after what was going with the economy. May be its anti-incumbency or strong campaign of the Congress which tackled weaknesses of the BJP, the fact is democracy and the citizens of india have given their verdict.

What appears more shocking to me after the election that people still making a hay of an indian citizen of foreign origin holding the post of prime minister - as a big issue. We the same people talked tremendously and extended support when people of indian origin earned laurels in foreign lands - Mahendera Chaudhary became prime minster of Fiji, Bobby Jindal ran for Lousiana governor or may be for any other non-political post.

I am not defending any particular person or party but I am trying to have a debate on why a post like prime minister cannot be open for indian citizens of foreign origin. If one finds a person incompetent or lacks experience, then one should tackle it on that front. I myself strongly oppose some policies of the Congress party. But I think the world in which we are living today, we have to grow and be independent and think about competencies rather then an individual's origin. I was never taught at school to distinguish people based on their origin. Let India the greatest democracy, take a step ahead and show what a democracy is meant to be.

European Semantic Web Symposium 2004

Crete, Greece a great place for a conference. The week just passed by attending the first European semantic web conference at Heraklion. The place was wonderful, atmosphere was cool and the topic was great. The conference was well attended by around 200 plus people. My congratulations to all the people involved in the organization.

The talks were interesting, some of them stimulating but these are still scratching the surface. And this makes you realize a lot of work has yet to be done and some fundamental problems need to be solved. Semantic Web promises a lot and the road from the problem to the solution is quite fuzzy.

I myself would like this huge effort to succeed but as I started working into the field, I am getting to know the core problems which are as old as of the 80s. The application cases presented in the conference were interesting and did quite a lot but they are in my opinion mere use of RDF and related technologies. They don't justify how using semantic technologies helped as regards to implementing them in simple relational or object oriented technologies of today. And this I think is fundamental to the success of Semantic Web. And that's why I think industry is still keeping away from semantic technologies to a larger extent as of today.

One thing that I understood from the talk by Guus Schreiber, was the difference between ontologies and data models. Ontologies are meant to be fundamentally developed in a shared community. This is what gives ontology its meaning. If one is developing and using his own small ontology in OWL, its still a data model and not an ontology.

Most people have an intuition that semantic web technologies can work and some others are susceptical. Only time can tell which one succeeds. I am myself interested in how technology can be applied in real information systems and solve real life problems.

It will be great to see what the next semantic web conference presents. Its also in Heraklion !!!

Simplicity Vs Complexity

Its been a few months when I came to know about the world of blogging and started reading blogs regularly. The technology for blogging existed from quite long. But its just now it has started having a ripple effect. Even though technology behind might not be complex, but its merely the simplicity that makes it tick.

I favor the fact that technology has to made more accessible to people rather then people changing their ways to adapt to technology. There might be cases when we humans need to adjust to technology but where ever possible technology should try to seamlessly fit in an individual's life.

Its the simplicity of a technology which makes it appealing to the masses and we as technologists, entrepreneurs need to understand this fact more closely. In technology world, people often talk about having built complex systems but unless one can't simplify the complexity, one is still living in a complex world. The essence is to build systems doing complex tasks in a simple way.

We have moved from the world of huge mainframes, to workstations and now into smart phones. And with each move the number of people getting affected are much larger. The difference between simplicity and complexity will play a much bigger role in the coming world of nanotechnologies. What we need is to understand technology in relation to the way we work, use them in a simple and effective manner - which can then have a far reaching effect on our lives.