Thursday, August 13, 2009

Search Footprint of Popular Sites

I was trying to compare search engines... what with all the buzz about bing and google caffeine. So, to test them out, among other things, I searched my own name and a few friends' name. And guess what? The only relevant links were from facebook.com. 3 or 4 links from my own facebook page and a few from my friends' pages. And of course Linked in home pages. What happened to all the tons of other sites I'm registered on. There are so many places I've described myself, listed my interests hobbies! If someone knew it was my birthday and looked up my name on Google, how would they find out that I love games? That I love House M.D.? If they don't know, how will I get all the gifts?

Try this: search "orkut " or "yahoo ". It doesn't pull up your public profile!

Now, seriously. I see a marketing opportunity here! Search for someone and you should get all their profiles on various sites. You should see what they've been upto and what keeps them interested and busy.

In fact, the situation is so bad that rarely ever do you see profiles from websites other than the ones you take the initiative of logging into to check on your friends.

Is there any benefit from this?

Its good for the social sites:

If at all I browse for a name and find listings only from facebook and linked in... would I try other sites? Websites try to make it easy for their users to find links among their millions of users, so that they stay and connect through their websites. Why not let them use their favourite google search to get to your site?

Its good for the net citizen:
I would love to register at xyz.com if I google friends' names, and find that they already have profiles on xyz.com!

Its also good for google:
Google will become the friend-finder of choice... and get us to all the awesome websites where we can hang out. And in those profile pages, the websites can display google ads relevent to the profile being viewed, and the visitor will end up sending a gift, or something. Even think of this scenario... I look up a friend whose hobbies include yoga, and there's nice little yoga-class ad sitting right there near the orkut profile page! I'm sure it adds value for every one involved.

How to fix this?
Of course, this is exactly what Facebook has fixed recently with its user home pages. But, static links are not really necessary. Only the pages should be available without Whatever uid the website uses for the person's profile is irrelevant to me... google will take me to the profile page. I'm sure web developers are realising this, but it is important for the big ones to keep up, or they'll get beaten by the newbies who use their heads. For eg., I think twitter is, on a basic level, just GTalk status message logging. Orkut could/should have figured this out themselves... and done something about it!

What about privacy?
Of course, all this doesn't mean you compromise on privacy and security. Obviously, a public domain listing of my profile should be there only if I've chosen "make my profile to all visitors". And again, my "public profile" need only have information about me that I wish to make public, and not stuff like contact information and mail Ids. To get those details, they would have to login in to that website and "add as friend" or something.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Investigative piece on IIPM: Some User Views I Like

IIPM - BEST ONLY IN CLAIMS?

A superior course, global exposure, international faculty and dollar salaries, so claims IIPM. Careers360 investigates.

Read the full Article here: http://www.careers360.in/cover-story/iipm---best-only-in-claims.php

My favorite picks among the comments from the same website are pasted below for the in-a-big-hurry reader. I'm happy to see such fiery articles and such varied responses. Some of the comments are indeed very sensible. It is imperative to ensure that, in all this institution-bashing, the students who went there don't get demonized.

The lack of care and analysis from the people, while taking important decisions in life, is appalling and is as much a reason for any blatant fraud, as is the bad intentions of the perpetrators. Also, amusing is the 3rd party response- or the lack of it. There must be more public scrutiny and media research on this and many other matters.

My favorite quote from a comment: "Kapil Sibal - if u have a conscience, please help IIPM students."

Selected and diverse comments:

IIPm is not alone.There are thousand more such fraudulent colleges in south india.They engage their own students to lure hapless parents to come to their
college.They charge a hefty donation and a part of it is also given to the broker.This is rampant in all the deemed universities of south india.The quality of education is very poor.Because nobody is interested in education.There are no labs.The students are simply awarded the distinction.The parents also don't think it neccessary to authenticate the colleges.In my opinion the media should play active role prevent these colleges from ruining innumeberable lifes.


I had a pretty good idea about IIPM and its claims. But only now did I come to the know the extent of it. They say they have affiliation with Universities such as Berkely HAAS. These should be sued a 100 times over. Its not just this. Education in India is a huge business. And people exploit it without giving it a second thought. I am really not sure who is responsible. Is it the parents or the Institutes themselves. If people were more aware these losers will not be able to take advantage in the first place. You guys have done an amazing job. GREAT WORK. You could do reviews on lot other institutes also.


Here is what I would like to know: Any investigative story should give an opportunity to the subject to respond. The story focusses on advertisements and clearly reveals that they are exaggerations and misrepresentations at best and lies at worst. But it says little about the quality of education and real life experiences being offered by IIPM. Surely if many tens of thousands of people study there year after year they are not all fools.

How do we know this so called "investigation" is not an attempt to blackmail IIPM into advertising with career360? Did Career 360 contact IIPM for ads before this story?

In reality any student could and should have sent these emails to foreign institutes mentioned by IIPM. It is hardly an investigation to send some emails.

When it turns out that UC Berkley does have a relationship with IIPM, the writer does not like that either.

I think IIPM is guilty of salesmanship here. But is it giving real, useful business education to students is another question.

I know MBA from top universities in US and Europe who are little more than white collar bandits. And I know MBA from small unknown universities doing great jobs.
So lets not rush to attack everything one and everything about IIPM.

The article raises a ,ot more questions than it answers and it is beginning of a good story that should be expanded not only to look into IIPM but top business schools of India. And while we are at it, lets look at human-trafficking mafia that sends Indian students to UK, Australia, Canada, Cyprus and other foreign colleges that are no more than sweat shops.

I am sure Career360 will investigate all of them and not accept ads from any of those dodgy and third rate sweat shops.


Like many other good investigation this will also fall in deaf ears of govt, some minister will head a panal to look in the matter and will get some some cut ( if not already getting) from the IIPM fraud keep it open for years to come till we forget this, or find a different topic.

At Best they will shut it, only to be opened with other name and new ad with even more stupid photo, as the formula to fool students and ppl is known.

from a business point of view makes sense, so if one does not get good education then atleast make some good money out of it.

MR. Kapil S are you listening ????

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Complain away!

I want the govt. to make a website… complainindia.gov or something. Here, people can complain about any social or political problem they face, and organize them with categories and tags.

The neat part is that the govt. should, as a policy, take no action on any of these items… at least for a period of one year. The next year, it should solve the small, isolated problems which require some project to be executed. The third year, policy changes should be made, to fix systemic problems. The fourth year, legal action and problems requiring investigation should be handled.

Why is inaction better?

* Present systems are slack. Responsibilities cannot be assigned for mistakes done. So, forget assigning responsibilities.
* Forgive mistakes already committed. Fix problems which are present.
* Give time and reasons for wrong doers to reduce future mistakes and stop eventually. No punishment in this phase as well.
* Put new systems in place to prevent temptation and encourage operational efficiency and build responsibility-tracking into the system.
* System is expected to have come to ‘repaired’ state by now.
* Just monitor and update operational procedures to keep this going.

If not anything else, data mining from site data can at least show statistics about people's problems.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Gears from Google... Gateway to the Next Generation of WebApps





Google does it again!

Google has come up with yet another revolutionary technology... Gears. And they've gone and made it open and independent from Google, making it a community project. (Gears is in version 0.5 as of today)

So, what is Gears?
Gears is like an energy-drink for JavaScript. Its a plug-in for browsers which will add powerful modules to JavaScript. To start-off with, they've added three nice features... but remember, this is just the tip of the iceberg!
1. A way to enable offline mode for web applications like GMail and GoogleDocs
2. A way for webapps to do multi-threading
3. A way for web applications to easily get your current location from a maps server

(check the nuts-and-bolts section below for more details on this)
And all these features will work on PDA mobile phones as well (Windows Mobile, iPhone, Symbian, Android)!

How will Gears help?
Just compare GoogleDocs and a Windows application like Microsoft Word. Why is GoogleDocs a very simple tool compared to Word?
1. The HTML + JavaScript programming can't beat the power of VisualC++
2. GoogleDocs is online app and you are not always connected to net

What Gears is doing is adding modules to JavaScript to make it more powerful across all browsers... Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera, etc. Gears has added JavaScript support for local data storage on PC for webapps, multi-threading, location awareness, etc. So, GoogleDocs can become powerful and it can work just fine even when you're not connected to the net... and your recent files can be accessed from the PC itself(automatic sync).

What more can Gears offer in the future?

These are some features which might come up very soon on Gears:
-Media streaming (you wouldn't need a flash plugin to watch YouTube videos)
-2D graphics for WebApps(imagine full-fledged word processor like MS Word, inside Firefox!)
-
3D graphics for WebApps(imagine 3D games played live and online just from within a website)

Final Words
In the near future I think Gears will enable cloud-computing in a big way, turning the internet space upside down. To get a feel of things to come, check these out...
1. You won't need to install many software on your PC... they can use the cloud computing model like GoogleDocs.
2. Applications like GoogleDocs will become powerful like desktop applications.
3. Software piracy is not applicable to webapps because the program is inside the server... so, webapps will have almost no piracy problems. So, you will have to pay money for complex software. But, most software for personal use will be free, or atleast dirt-cheap.
4. JavaScript will become way more powerful than VBScript. That will spell the last death-note for IE. (currently some websites work only on IE because VBScript is powerful)
5. Flash will be demolished by Gears-based apps in a major way
6. Business applications like HRMS, CRM, ERP, Project Tracker, etc. will become more powerful and user-friendly web apps
7. rich user interface webapps, helped by Gears, on laptops and mobile phones, will allow these devices to exploit cloud computing to implement complex software like 3D modeling, crash simulations, financial modeling etc.

The internet is now getting ready to take a big step. Lets wait and see just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
--------------------------
(All comments are most welcome)



The Nuts-and-bolts
A little bit of explanation about the first three features in Gears:
1. A way to enable offline mode for web applications like GMail and GoogleDocs
So, a webapp can be made to work when there's no net connection, by storing the webpages and some necessary data.
For example, GMail can now be used when you're not connected to the internet. GMail will store copies of your recent mails on your PC and allow you to work offline. Any changes will be sync-ed when you go back online.
2. A way for webapps to do multi-threading
This would allow a web app to do several time-consuming calculations/server-calls in the background(using threads) while allowing the user-interface to be responsive.
3. A way for web applications to easily get your current location from map server
This would allow web apps to become location-aware. For example, suppose you use a website to manage your tasks. When you're in office, the website can show official tasks first in the list, by checking your street address! (figuring out your street address can be done by a location server from your lan IP or the GPRS tower connected to your laptop datacard)