Wednesday, 30th April, 2008
Category:
Internet
,
Google
,
Compute Cloud
,
Amazon
,
Software
So, you want to develop a killer Internet application. You have a great idea, and ready to work on it. One thing that puzzles every web application developer is the choice of platform, host and the technology.
If you haven't thought about scaling issues, you will be in a serious trouble and may require to rewrite the whole application. I past one year or so we have witnessed enormous developments in the web development tools and frameworks space. Frameworks like Django (this blog is written in django), Javascript libraries like YUI, Prototype, Scriptaculous, hosting platforms like Amazon EC2 and Google Appengine gives us great options in terms of what we can do and how we can transform our ideas. All the great technologies has given a new meaning to web 2.0.
I personally like Google Appengine because I like Python web programming and worked on couple of python frameworks. Google Appengine also gives seamless integration with Google accounts this is a big win win if your application requires user login and sign ups. On the other hand, Amazon EC2 gives you a server in the cloud, you have to take care of everything from imaging the machine, installing the webserver and configuring various components. This can be advantage for some individuals and companies, because it brings lot of flexibility and in real sense this is the true cloud computing, where you can just write any application which requires parallel processing and run on several machines at Amazon datacenter.
If your application is simply a database backed web application, Google Appengine can be a good choice, though its datastore technology will not give you full benefit of RDBMS database. Applications like Digg, Slashdot, delicious are good examples of high traffic sites which can be perfectly hosted with Google Appengine.
I am planning to move my blog from the shared hosting to Google Appengine. One benefit would be Google indexing, it would be so easy for Google crawler to index my site from one of its neighbour machine. :)
Wednesday, 30th April, 2008
Category:
Google
,
Apple
,
iPhone
,
Mobile
,
Software
Mobile software development is next big thing. More and more applications are moving from desktop to browser, and now to mobile phones.
Last month I was in Mountain View, and my room mate happened to be a Mobile software developer. Almost every Google mobile product you have used has his big contribution. I had very good conversations with him about Mobile software development, opportunities and challenges.
After coming back to India, I started exploring more about mobile software development. Mobile software is no longer about Windows mobile vs. Symbian, now we have many mobile platforms, like iPhone, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile.
Before you begin Mobile software development, your choice of platform is very important. Your future in mobile technologies depends on the future of the mobile platform you choose.
iPhone Vs. Android
iPhone can you give you huge user base, on the other hand Android gives you open source advantage.
iPhone brings with it huge user base, but its sdk is in Objective C. So, you must know or must be willing to learn Objective C. Apple Developer center has lot of resources on iPhone development, I will list them at the end of this post.
If you are good at Java or like Java platform, then Android might interest you. Other advantage with Android is that its open source and obviously Google's support for Android is a big win. There is rich documentation available on Android Google site.
The two platform also differs in the way you can distribute your software. iPhone applications can only be distributed through Apple distribution channel, which can be a limiting factor depending on your application and business needs. On the other hand Android being open source, you are free to release and distribute your Android application just like any other open source application.
Here are the list of resources for iPhone and Android software development.
iPhone developer resources
All the resources listed below are available at
Apple iPhone developer site:
Android developer resources
Various documentation and sdk download is available at
Android developer site.
Monday, 21st April, 2008
Category:
Internet
,
Google
,
browser
Google released a new firefox addon
Send To Phone, using which you can highlight a text on any web page and send it as a text message to any mobile phone.
You can download the extension
here. Once downloaded and installed, restart the firefox browser.
How to use
After installation a
icon will appear on the upper right hand corner of the browser window. Select the text on a web page you wish to send as text message, and click on the
icon.
Fill in the number you wish to send the message to and select appropriate carrier. Click 'Send Message', and bingo the selected text is sent as SMS message to the recipient.
This facility is available only for US subscribers.
Detailed FAQs are available here
Saturday, 19th April, 2008
Category:
Yahoo
,
Internet
,
Google
,
Business & Money
If you have a website and make money through
Google Adsense, there is possibility that spammers are eating a portion of your revenue by getting your site's legitimate traffic. A spammy search result on
Google/
Yahoo, might impact search traffic of some legitimate sites. Before the search engine algorithms detect spam and kills it, the spammer already had got enough traffic, impacting traffic of your site.
What can you do
If you find spam search result, report it to the search engine, which will ultimately help in boosting your site's traffic.
Report search engine spam using the following links:
Google spam report
Yahoo spam report
Sunday, 13th April, 2008
Category:
Google
,
Projects
After playing around with
Google Appengine APIs during weekend, I have launched
gcookbook.com, a site for submitting programming and technology recipes.
Submit your cool technology recipes and share it with others.
Thursday, 24th January, 2008
Category:
Information
,
Internet
,
Google
A new study overturns the common assumption that the 'Internet Generation' – youngsters born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most web-literate. The first ever virtual longitudinal study carried out by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web.
Our dependence on search engines has changed the way we find and consume information. We no longer are dependent on libraries, we do not read newspapers but browse and view information online.
I did a short survey this weekend, to find out how much information 'Internet Generation' posses and their level of General Knowledge. I selected two groups of people, one which can be termed as Net savvy, who spend at least 4 hours everyday online and search for information online and the other group who spend most of the time offline reading books and newspaper, and use internet for just email and shopping.
I asked members of each group some general knowledge questions like 'Who is the president of India?', 'What is the capital of Israel?' and surprisingly 68% of the members of the 'Internet Generation' has given wrong answers, compared to 14% from the other group.
This leads me to very important conclusion, the 'Internet Generation', uses internet mostly for leisure and entertainment. In most of the developing countries like India, Internet is mostly used for Social Networking, Instant Messaging and Gaming.
Internet has also changed our digital information seeking behavior. Internet users collect content in the form of downloads but majority of the downloads are never read. Almost all of my friends have big e-books collection, but none of us ever read a full e-book. According to a survey1, average time spent by a user on a ebook is very short: typically 4 to 8 minutes respectively. We use digital information just for reference and never read online in the traditional sense, but just browse. According to another survey1 60 per cent of e-journal users view no more than three pages and a majority (up to 65 percent) never return.
The study conducted by CIBER research team and University College London summarizes that we are good at searching information but bad at processing it.
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