Check out this TED talk by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, co-creator of Photosynth and an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, about the power of Photosynth.
Add it to a cool device like Microsoft Surface, you have the coolest social network gadget at your disposal. In the above video, listen to the response he gives to a question in the end. It talks about how powerful photosynth is and what is in store for the future.
Link thanks to Tim O’Reilly
Zoho is a small company that is trying to compete in the Office 2.0 market. It is taking on companies like Google and Microsoft. Even though they have some nifty tools in their office suite, their user base is relatively small. But it could change overnight if they can integrate their office suite into the Facebook platform. This will be a killer combination and it has the potential to overthrow big players in the market. I was listening to Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho, talking to Robert Scoble on his Scobleshow. In his chat, Sridhar Vembu mentioned that his target audience is small businesses and college grads. Facebook offers them a good opportunity to reach the college students. This will work to the advantage of Facebook too. An integrated office suite means more time spent on facebook platform, which translates into possible monetization options (for both Zoho and Facebook). Already facebook has box.net integrated into their platform. An office suite could be the next logical extension. I feel that Zoho Office Suite + Facebook could be the WebOS which everyone is talking about. Any takers?
Now you can allow anyone to view your Google Docs without the need to have a Google account. However, they still have to log into a Google account or an account through Google Apps to edit the document. This feature will come handy if you want to send the document to a mailing list or add it on your blog or send it to someone who has no interest in opening a Google account. Here is the information from Google in this regard.
This is great for people on the move. Now you can read your RSS feeds offline using Google Reader. When I logged into my Google Reader, I saw this option on the top which said that I can read upto 2000 feeds offline. It makes use of Google Gears, which is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs. I am pretty sure Google is going to allow you to use all your Google Apps offline. You can see some screenshots below.
When the facebook platform was opened to public last week, everyone was comparing it to how Microsoft built its ecosystem. But there is one subtle difference between the Microsoft’s approach to their ecosystem and facebook’s approach. Microsoft tried their best to promote their apps over the other third party apps. They integrated their apps much more closely to their platform and had many apps pre installed on their platform. However, facebook didn’t try to promote their apps over the other third party apps. They allowed their apps to compete on a level playing field with third party apps. Except for some of the apps they had from the time before their platform announcement, all their apps appears in the same application directory available for other third party applications. I feel that facebook has shown better ethics than Microsoft in building an ecosystem around their platform. Kudos to facebook for this.
Observed from the Ali Partovi’s interview on VentureBeat.
After the much hyped platform announcement by Facebook, the tech blogosphere is full of conversations about how Myspace is Mr. Microsoft and Facebook is Mr. Google. There are many people who offered unsolicited advice to Widget companies telling them that they should concentrate on Facebook instead of betting their hopes on Myspace. As far as I am concerned, there is no big difference between Facebook and Myspace. Both of them lock you in without an option to take your data elsewhere. Anyhow, this is not the point of this post. I just want to point out that the tech blogosphere is missing a very important point in their advice to widget creators. Josh Catone of RWW points out this very important aspect of the widget economy.
The barrier for entry in creating a widget is so low that there’s really no reason not to develop your widget on as many platforms as possible. It costs virtually nothing to create a widget, and if your goal is attracting users, then spreading your widget around makes sense.
This is exactly the case. I think it is time for the tech blogosphere to come out of their pre long tail psyche. It is the kinda attitude that made hardware vendors to flock towards Microsoft instead of developing their drivers for all platforms. They want the widget vendors to do the same thing. I hope Josh’s argument prevails and we ensure that history doesn’t repeat again.
I have been checking our Zoho Notebook since its alpha days. As I have told in various forums, I am pretty impressed with it. Its UI is comparable to Microsoft’s One Note. After they moved to beta, I decided to start using it for my daily personal activities. Today, I completely lost a “book” on Zoho Notebook. I spent almost 2 hours getting ideas into that notebook. It is all gone now. I have sent a feedback to Zoho about it and asked them if it is possible to recover it from the backup (I was just editing a “book” I made few days back and it should be there in their backup). I will have to wait now to see if they can recover it. Anyhow, the moral of the story is that we should remember that it is still in beta and not put anything into it without a backup elsewhere. This post is not against Zoho Notebook (I love it) but this is a warning to others who might be keeping their data on it. Keep a backup elsewhere.
Update 1: Zoho guys were prompt in their response. They are going to implement auto-save and recycle bin pretty soon. This will ensure that such accidents doesn’t cause any harm. Thanks Arvind and Arun for prompt response on this issue.
Update 2: Zoho has added the auto-save feature into the notebook. Check out their post here.
Mike Arrington has this rant about what is happening in the valley
Times are good, money is flowing, and Silicon Valley sucks.
I don’t know what it is, but the same thing happened in the late nineties before the bubble burst. Lots of startups got funded that made no sense but people got excited anyway. A unique, beautiful and well executed idea was not a story worth talking about until that first round of big, eye-popping capital. People become more anxious, and more likely to snap at someone in anger or jealousy. Rumor mongering spikes, and a crucial balance is lost. It’s no longer about beautiful products and genius developers. It’s about the money and the status, and hot PR chicks and marketing departments.
I have to agree with him. Silicon Valley does look like how it was before the great dot com bust. Every dude next door has a “Web 2.0″ company churning out a product with whatever coding skills he/she has. The PR hype and parties everywhere reminds me of whatever we saw in the late 90s boom. Things need to cool down sometime pretty soon. Too much cacophony kills real innovation. We got Google, Amazon, etc out of the last bust. At that time, Silicon Valley got rid of “my boyfriend has got a dot com company syndrome” and started seeing real and consolidated innovation. It is time again for a slowdown so that we can absorb the “innovations” of the last couple of years into the mainstream and then get into a new cycle, again in a few years.
Youtube has joined hands with Eros Entertainment to offer Bollywood Channel. You can watch trailers of new Hindi movies here. Youtube already has thousands of Bollywood movie clips illegally uploaded by users. This is the first time Youtube has officially forayed into Indian cinema. The terms of the agreement is not known yet. It is not the first time Bollywood movies are streamed on the web. Rajshri films offers Bollywood movies on its website. Users can watch streaming movies for free and download it for a low price. They also offer various documentaries and TV shows. Similarly, Indya.com (Division of Star India Pvt. Ltd.) also offer streaming movies and television shows online at their broadband portal. However, with an abysmal broadband adoption rate in India, I am really not sure whether these companies can monetize successfully at present.
Update: Youtube and Tips Music has joined to offer another Bollywood Channel.
Thanks to Mashable for the Twitter tip.
From the wisdom of the crowds to the fury of the crowds. The digg saga has clearly exposed the plight of social media companies. It has turned from empowering the users to surrendering to the users. If you are someone who believe in the control of the users, you will consider this incident as a major victory. If you are a company running a social media website, you will be scared to death. Probably, the editors at the New York Times are smiling at Mike Arrington now. Whichever side you are on, this Digg moment is going to define the direction of the social media in the future. Whether it is good or bad depends on the side you are taking in this debate. This is definitely one of those defining moments in the history of Web 2.0 (whatever this term means).
