VoiceGain is a cloud telephony solution that allows Indian SME enterprises to store, manage and track telephone sales inquiries and leads. It allows sales inquiries to be routed real time to their field sales personnel on their mobile phone – anytime, anywhere. It also helps such organizations to offer customer support with a virtual call center technology infrastructure on a pay-per-use model.

Currently, VoiceGain offers 3 packaged products:

1. VoiceGain Pro is a cloud telephony service that helps growing businesses provide a high quality and professional caller experience to their prospects and customers

2. VoiceGain Service is a cloud telephony offering that helps call centers, both captive and outsourced, ramp their telephony infrastructure without having to make significant capital investments in on-premise PBX, ACDs and IVRs.

3. VoiceGain Sales is a cloud telephony offering that helps businesses with a distributed sales force route, respond, and manage their telephone leads.

» Similar products in cloud telephony space: Kookoo, Exotel 

[Via]

‘To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’

‘To instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most important to them.’

These are the mission statements of arguably the most popular Internet companies in the world – Facebook, Google and Twitter respectively. These statements encapsulate the philosophy and vision these companies and their products embody. They serve as a guiding principle for their future forays and new initiatives. Users, investors, VCs and even their own employees are quick to notice any deviation from the ‘mission’ and ensure that the management stays the course. Hence, a company constantly needs to reassure its users of its commitment and focus through every product it ships.

Much as mission statements are important to address one’s users, it is important to address another set of key stakeholders – the extended developer community. Most technology companies owe a debt of gratitude to thousands of developers who contribute directly or indirectly to their products. It is thus crucial to engage this audience meaningfully. This is where it perhaps makes sense for a company to have a ‘Development philosophy’ – a pledge to keep the interests of the larger developer community in mind when laying out its future product roadmap. It sets the bar high for transparency and accountability. It also helps leverage the developer community as participants in building a stronger product / platform for the users.

Facebook, Google, Twitter have had a checkered history when it comes to communicating and engaging with their developer community. Flip-flops on promises made in their earlier years, changes to their privacy clauses have left a lot to be desired. The most recent instance of this being Larry Page’s announcement of a single, unified Google experience and the SPYW (Search plus Your World) initiative. Ostensibly, it is a measure to simplify the myriad privacy policies across different services into a single, simple privacy policy across all of Google’s products. While it does not sound very harmful at first glance, it has raised alarm bells across the developer community. In fact, a bunch of Googlers themselves are quite miffed at this latest diktat.

During their early years, most successful technology startups scale rapidly and focus solely on shipping great products. This often leads to a situation where you build a product but fail to build a company. The philosophy and culture of a company are as important as the products and need to be shaped with the utmost care. This ensures long-term sustenance of not just the passion but also the values of the founding team.

For startup founders, it might make a lot of sense to have a development philosophy, which serves as a framework for its own development team as well as the extended developer community. The long-term payoff of such a move could be enormous and it could win the company long-term loyalty from the developer community.

What’s your take?

[Guest article contributed by Shashank P S. The author can be reached on twitter: @shashank_ps]

Of all the traffic that came to these business’ websites via social media, .98% of that traffic converted into leads, compared to LinkedIn’s 2.74%.

Less content is generally posted to LinkedIn than to other social networks, which is probably because people almost exclusively post marketing-related content as opposed to their children’s photos or social “chatter.” This means there is less clutter on LinkedIn, making a person capable of consuming a higher percentage of the content that’s active on LinkedIn at any given time. In other words, a business’ marketing posts are more likely to be noticed on LinkedIn than somewhere else.[blog]

As a social network, LinkedIn scores more when it comes to RoI/tangibles as opposed to Facebook or Twitter, which is currently going through too much of noise in the system.

What has been your experience with LinkedIn advertising?

Amazon Relation Database Service will support two databases. Mysql and Oracle with various versions. It is a kind of Platform as a Service in Amazon Cloud for Databases.

Features of Amazon RDS

1. Hassel free Setting up the DB Instance(machine)

No need to worry about Hardware, OS installation, MySQL Installation, and dependencies etc. Amazon is providing the simple Web Console or API’s or Command-lines to create/manage the DB Instances.

2. High Availability of DB Instance

Amazon provides High Availability, with Multi-AZ. If the Mutli-AZ is enabled on your instance, It will create a Standby copy of the DB Instance in another zone. In this way, it will provide you the high availability.

3. Great Performance with Read Replicas(RR)

You can create the Read Replicas from the master RDS instance, using this Read Replicas Instances you can diverse Read traffic to this, and writes on the Master DB. So, master DB will have less load. Amazon will take care of the Synchronization of the data between Master and Replicas.

4. Automated Backups

Amazon will provide you the automated backup, and you can configure the backups(DB snapshots) at your convenient timings. And the backups will be stored across all Availability Zones randomly. In this case, you have high availability of the Backups.

5. Easy Recovery of the DB

DB Snapshots also available in the console, you can easily recover the DB instance using Point-in-time Restore, It will restore the DB with latest Snapshot, or You can create a new DB Instance from the latest Snapshot.

6. Auto Upgradation

Upgradation of DB instance can be automatically taken care by the Amazon. The only thing is you need to provide the Maintenance Window. In the maintenance window, Amazon will execute the DB upgrades, Hardware Upgrades, and Hypervisor Upgrades etc.

7. Security

Amazon will disable the access of the instance by default for all. And you can authorize Specific IP’s or IP ranges only, for granting access and all Amazon will provide the Interfaces you.

8. Easy to manage the DB Instances

Amazon will provide all sorts of Interfaces to manage the RDS Platform. It has simple Web Console, and API’s for Developers and Command-line tools for Administrators.

9. DB parameter changes with no Downtime.

You can Change the DB parameters with Command-line tools easily without Downtime of the Instance.

10. Easy Scaling

You can simply increase the DB storage, CPU and Memory resources by modifying the DB Instance, at any point of time.

11. Monitoring and Alarming

Amazon will provide the Cloud Watch Monitoring tool, you can monitor the Amazon RDS Statistics like CPU utilization, No.of DB connections, Storage Usage, DB writes and Reads etc. And It also provides alarming to your email based on the threshold level settings by you.

12. Locality

Another benefit of using Amazon RDS is the option of selecting from multiple geographic regions to deploy your database(s).

13. DB Instances Activities Information

Amazon will provide you the Recent/History of Events happened/performed on the RDS instances, like Instance rebooting, modifying, DB snapshot taken etc..

14. Support

Amazon has great support via Amazon Forums. Lot of Amazon users and their Concept Experts and respective Feature Developers from Amazon will answer for your questions on forums. For your question, at least within 3 to 4 hours of time, you can expect a solution, and they will correct it at the backend, if you provide the details. Here is the link to post the questions on forum.

Disadvantages of Amazon RDS

1. No Complete control on the DB instances, and you cannot get the logs to analyze any issues/problems.

2. With Single-AZ RDS instance Deployment; DB backup is almost highly impossible, if DB size is more like 5GB or me.

3. We will not have any control on the Stand by DB instance on the Multi-AZ deployment mode.

4. Amazon Will not inform you about the Maintenance activities on DB instances. But you can get to know by visiting their forums.

Keep visiting this space for more on Amazon RDS management, How-to’s etc.

[Editorial Notes: Guest article contributed by Praveen Kumar Muppala, Infrastructure Technical Lead at Kuliza. Praveen earlier wrote an article on EC2 instance monitoring : Explained: Amazon EC2 Instance Status Monitoring and Managing Scheduled Events]

Also see: Amazon DynamoDB Looks Like A Game Changer

Oracle Big Data Appliance includes:

• Open source distribution of Apache Hadoop to transform data
• Oracle NoSQL Database Enterprise Edition to capture and manage data
• Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop to simplify data integration from Hadoop and an Oracle Database
• Oracle Loader for Hadoop to quickly load data into Oracle Database
• Open source distribution of R
• Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle Java HotSpot Virtual Machine

Recommended Read: What is the Big Fuss about Big Data?

Recent Big Data funding: Mu Sigma Closes $108 Million Investment Round, Led by General Atlantic

Wikipedia? SOPA/via @herpderpedia

Today, Wikipedia and several other sites are protesting against SOPA and this has been a BIG cause of concern for students who are used to *copy-paste* rewrite, learn from Wikipedia.

Bangalore based geek, Vivek Gupta has developed a simple Chrome extension that unblocks the SOPA message and shows you the ‘original’ Wikipedia (link).

Go ahead students, get back to your homework now.

[PS: If you are a geek building hot/cool stuff, do share with us on Pluggd.in forum]

Wikipedia says that be bills are problematic because:

• Among other serious problems in the current draft of the bills, the requirement exists for US-based sites to actively police links to purported infringing sites.
• These kinds of self-policing activities are non-sustainable for large, global sites – including ones like Wikipedia.
• The legislative language is ambiguous and overly broad, even though it touches on protected speech.
• Congress says it’s trying to protect the rights of copyright owners, but the “cure” that SOPA and PIPA represent is worse than the disease.”

Wikipedia was launched in 2001 as a free encyclopedia edited by thousands of volunteers across the world. It is one of the sites with most traffic on the Internet. If they were to police links, we would not get the amount of information we do today.

This reminds me of my favorite poem By Rabindranath Tagore:

“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high

Where knowledge is free

Where the world has not been broken up into narrow domestic walls

Where words come out from the depth of truth

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Where the mind is led forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”

Ironically SOPA and PIPA are actually well intentioned causes. They are intended to protect the rights and freedom of creators of content, the copyright owners. But the larger question is how are we to control the dissemination of information? Technology allows us freedom that was not available to us previously. Who will police this deluge of information and in what manner? Is it even possible to police such large content? At what point do we need self-regulation vs government threat?

India is also asking websites to police the content. In December 2010, Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal asked social websites like Google and Facebook to ensure that uploading of derogatory material online is stopped. Sibal has said that the content posted on some of the sites was so offensive that it would hurt the religious sentiments of a large section of communities in the country. In that sense Kapil Sibal is being called the human SOPA of India, but SOPA and SIBAL stand for different things.

SOPA wants to protect the rights of content creators but by telling everyone to keep a watch on every link. Sibal on the other hand wants to impose his diktat on what should be our freedom of speech.

Everyone has the freedom voice their concern, debate on what someone said, including Mr. Vinay Rai who has gone to the courts alleging criminal negligence by Google, Facebook and other companies for not removing objectionable material from their sites. (more about him here).

We are dangerously close to losing our sensibilities as to how hurt we should be if someone writes inflammatory content. When should your freedom to get offended subdue my freedom of speech? When should my endeavor to stop copyright violation become my responsibility that will be a punishable offense?

These are very human questions and not as much legal. There will be courts and laws to guide but they will not settle the disputes. This must emerge as an issue that gets resolved sensibly by a mature society. Without such sensibility all Internet will be just illegal content full of venom and all of us will be up in arms against each other.

A healthy self regulation like that adopted by the Advertisement Industry is the need of the hour.

The Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) has adopted a Code for Self-Regulation in Advertising. It is a commitment to honest advertising and to fair competition in the market-place. It stands for the protection of the legitimate interests of consumers and all concerned with advertising – advertisers, media, advertising agencies and others who help in the creation or placement of advertisements.

This is something the SMS industry in India has failed to do and has done too little too late. I recently changed my mobile operator and my number. Even before I could share my new number with my friends and family I was inundated with spam SMSes. The Do-not-Disturb registry kicked in only after 7 days and till then I continued to receive Spam. How is that remotely sensible?

Is it any wonder that SMS as a channel in all probability will show signs of slowdown?

I am a digital marketer and know the power of email marketing. However I know how bad everyone thinks email marketing is. I work with the team at www.juvlon.com and we have been making several attempts to bring the big email marketers together for a common cause – to self regulate and wage war on SPAM.

India has no SPAM laws. A report published recently cited India amongst the top destinations in the world where SPAM originates. (Read AFP: Spammers propel India to junk-mail top spot ). The situation may get worse before it improves. There are “email lists” up for sale everywhere, the same list are sold by agencies to multiple clients. I have heard stories of harassed customers receiving many emails on the same day from different companies. His name was perhaps on such list which was sold over and over to many companies.

Email is not invasive. At least not as much as SMS is. Plus Email providers sort out the junk email cleverly so the average reader does not feel the impact of the problem. When someone like Kapil Sibal becomes a victim of some clever phishing scam or becomes fed up with incessant emails, Marketers might suddenly find themselves scrambling for cover. This has severe implications for legitimate email marketing service providers and Email Marketers. It won’t be long before a DND like situation emerges in the Email Industry and the government turns around and puts demands that may not be well thought out on marketers as well as service providers.

Sure, we will find ways to delay and muddle any anti-spam laws, but prevention is better than cure.

So be it SOPA SMS or SPAM the answer to a sensible system of policing is to have laws that give overall guidelines and are supported by self-regulation by the industry leaders.

What’s your opinion?

[Guest article by Geetanjali Dighe, part of Juvlon team.]

Today we collectively stand on the edge where there is a need to find the next social structure that will potentially guide the internet into the future. It requires vision and motivation, and not only the use of technology in web design to direct its course into the future.

The essential ‘Dos’ while building your web design- for the savviest online customers in the history

1. Strategy and Planning: We need to realize that a great web strategy does not arrive from a cognitive boardroom. However, it’s guided by your customers. Conventional design strategies reacts of the choice people are known to make online, whereas a carefully thought strategic web planning anticipates the fundamental needs and desires of your customers to make those choices.

2. Involving advanced customer research as well as getting on-board deep analytics that helps to accentuate web communication and engagement of your Brand through your web-design.

3. Use the web media convincingly to start a compelling conversation between your brand and your customers… thus using this mode to interact and attract your customer through engaging web design presence.

4. Today’s web design is all about engaging with social media and social influencers to effectively position your brand through interactive web design.

The essential ‘Don’ts ‘while building your web design

1. Remember, that innovation cannot be forced. It has to be fostered. Therefore, by being too-innovative with your web design, you may end up annoying your customers.

2. Do not steal content of design concept from other sites. As all solutions need to be grounded to the realities of the business that the website is catering to, therefore it is quintessential to be original in both content and concept.

3. Do not overcrowd your web design. As the ability to extract value and enable the construction of meaning in the abundance and complexity of data and digital information has become poor. Therefore, do not over-complicate your website design. It pays to be simple because it pays to be understood.

[Guest article contributed by Manik Kinra, cofounder of JadeMagnet.]

A few days back, Google was caught in an awkward situation when a Kenya based startup, Mocality caught Google employees scraping data from the startup site.

From the OpenStreetMap blog:

Preliminary results show users from Google IP address ranges in India deleting, moving and abusing OSM data including subtle edits like reversing one-way streets.
Two OpenStreetMap accounts have been vandalizing OSM in London, New York and elsewhere from Google’s IP address, the same address in India reported by Mocality.

The most obvious vandalism started around last Thursday last week from these particular users however it may take us some time to do a full analysis. In fact over the last year we have had over 102 thousand hits on OSM using at least 17 accounts from this Google IP.

Do you have an example of malicious data? Yes, here:http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/10375538 (London),http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/10375581 (New York City) where a user from that IP address modified one way streets [reversed and deleted]. Here: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/145893931/historywhere a user added a fake Olympic stadium.

Even in case of Mocality, some of the scraping were reported to have come from Google IP address in India.

As far as these issues (of data vandalism/theft) are concerned, its less about Google’s intention and more about company not being able to manage contractors/vendors who are often paid on accuracy of data collected. Even some of the Indian Internet companies (+ media firms) have been accused (of similar unethical dealings) by startups (though not reported in public), but its very often the contractors who are responsible for such tactics. Having said that, it’s the company ownership to ensure that such things do not happen – easier said than done, but thanks to Internet and social media – there is still a bit of democracy left.

* In India, AOL has launched its MapQuest in India product based on OpenStreetmap, which has received funds from AOL and Microsoft.

If you start researching how celebrities use social media and narrow a little on Facebook and Twitter you will see a prominent name in both the platforms: Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) has 45,633,442 Facebook fans and 16,862,231 Twitter followers. She is among the most popular celebrities on social media, but what is interesting is the list of celebrities who use social media, ranging from Barack Obama (@BarackObama) to Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) to Kate Perry (@katyperry). There are celebrities from all aspects of life using social media, and how they use it is different from how non-celebrities use it. Their audience is far more widespread and the statements they make online can lead to both a positive change or result in a defamation lawsuit. One such example has been Courtney Love (@Courtney) who has already been sued a couple of times for her defamatory tweets

Celebrities typically use social media to converse with their fans, or share updates, photographs and videos with them. Along with promoting their latest campaign, or music or movie release, they also promote social causes that they support.Interesting Cases

One interesting case in the use of social media is Barack Obama. He was hailed as ‘the first social media president’ and one of the first politicians to leverage social media for political campaigns. His election success and large social media following is a result of his social media strategy. He harnessed his blog, YouTube account, Twitter stream (he has over 11 million followers), and Facebook page (he has over 24 million fans) during the presidential elections. He now uses Twitter and Facebook updates to communicate his views on various topics.

Another interesting celebrity on social media is Ashton Kutcher. He was one of the very early Twitter users when twitter was actually made fun of in late night talk shows. @aplusk was the first celebrity to discover the potential of Twitter as a medium to communicate with fans. He also is considered to be more technically-know-hoe among all celebrities and was one of the very few celebrities who replied to each one of his fans personally. Things here got a little ugly when he tweeted defending Joe Paterno, who was fired in the wake of a sexual abuse scandal. As a result of the criticism he faced, he decided to let his team at Katalyst update his Twitter account. Kutcher is one of the celebrities who has been active on most of the social media platforms right from Twitter and Facebook to Google plus and YouTube.

Promoting Social Causes

Celebrities also use social media to promote social causes to their audience. In this case the pre-requisite is that celebrities should be passionate about the cause. One campaign that attracted the support of many social media heavyweights such as Lady Gaga, Justein Beiber (@justinbieber) and Britney Spears (@britneyspears) was the ‘I am gonna be your friend’ campaign. The campaign was about saving the starving children in Eastern Africa. Bob Marley’s video was the main face of the campaign. The movement was supported heavily on Facebook and Twitter by all celebrities. Other campaigns are backed by just one celebrity. Two examples are:

- Lady Gaga established a partnership with the Robin Hood Foundation to spread awareness about the homeless in New York and donate $1 million via a crowd-sourced charity contest.

- Justin Beiber partnered with Pencils of Promise to launch Schools4All to provide education to millions of children around the world.

Whether for collaborative or individual campaigns, celebrities provide charities and NGOs a vast reach that they cannot otherwise achieve on their own, resulting in more help, support and donations from the public.

But how successful are these campaigns? We see that the most successful of the campaigns were the ones where the celebrities were passionate about the cause. When the celebrities are not passionate about the cause and do it just for the money, then the cause does not fare well.

Movies and music

Social media is used to promote all types of movies. Movies invariably have an official website, official Facebook page, Twitter handle, and of course a hashtag to promote the film and make sure fans are involved in all the discussions revolving around the movie. The recent release of the Indian film Ra.One, one of the most expensive Bollywood films ever made, was promoted fiercely on Facebook/Twitter/Google+). A new marketing initiative for Ra.One, made possible by Google+, was a hangout for fans with Shah Rukh Khan.

Social media has opened a vast gateway for music lovers and music bands. If you look at the top celebrity list in social media you will see the top spots are ruled by singers. Social media has also catapulted some to stardom – Justin Beiber became known through his first YouTube video and Rebeca Black became famous for her Friday Night YouTube video.

Social media has enabled well-known bands to control more of their music and content than previously. It works well for bands that already have a following, such as the Cranberries who can give away their latest song for free on facebook, or Maroon 5, who released their latest video of “Moves Like a Jagger Video” with Victoria’s Secret models lip syncing on YouTube. The initial trailblazers in controlling the release of material were Radiohead. Their album “In the Rainbow” was released initially only on their website for download and people could pay as much or as little as they wanted for it.

Social media also gives smaller bands a far larger potential audience than they would have had. Apart from communicating and sharing videos through Facebook and Twitter they can also upload their songs to platforms like soundcloud. Here people can instantaneously upload sounds and songs. There is also the MyBand application on Facebook, which has proved popular. Another recently launched, music-orientated social network has been turntable.fm. The main objective is to go beyond the Facebook and Twitter format of direct interaction, providing an experience similar to the “AOL chatrooms concept”.

Social media has expanded the marketing potential for celebrities and their movies, music or social causes. This can be on popular platforms like Facebook and Twitter or social networks built around specific interests. However, with the need to reach as many people as possible, it is unlikely that celebrities will gravitate to social networks focused on a shared interest, like turntable.fm. What is more likely is that celebrities will continue to populate the platform where most of their fans already are, or look to bring fans to their own websites where they can form a whole new concept of social interaction.

[This is a guest post by Aram Bhusal, who works as a software developer at Kuliza. You can read more of his articles at ZaGarage.]

Amazon has recently launched a new feature called EC2 Instance Status Monitoring, which will monitor your instance and will let you know the status of your instance. Like it requires Instance reboot, System Reboot or Instance Retirement.

Before this feature, AWS EC2 machines will suddenly reboot, or will go to unresponsive state with out prior notice. This has caused the lot of troubles for the applications and data availability.

Today, there are three types of activities that we might need to undertake on our instances: System Reboot, Instance Reboot, or Instance Retirement. Amazon do all of these things today, but have only been able to tell us about the status via email notifications. Making the events available to you through our APIs and the AWS Management Console will allow you to review and respond to them either manually or programmatically.

System Reboot

Amazon will schedule a System Reboot when they need to do maintenance on the hardware or software supporting our instance. While Amazon are able to perform many upgrades and repairs to their fleet without scheduling reboots, certain operations can only be done by rebooting the hardware supporting an instance. Amazon won’t schedule System Reboots very often, and only when absolutely necessary. When an instance is scheduled for a System Reboot, we will be given a time window during which the reboot will occur. During that time window, we should expect our instance to be cleanly rebooted.  This generally takes about 2-10 minutes but depends on the configuration of our instance. If our instance is scheduled for a System Reboot, it means our system will come up with a new underlying hardware.

If our instance’s root device is an EBS volume, we can stop and re-start it (be careful not to shutdown or terminate your instance). If we choose to do so, some configuration settings will changes.

If we stop and restart our instance, the following changes occur. If we wait for Amazon EC2 to perform the scheduled reboot automatically, these configuration settings remain the same, but there might be little impact on your services.

• Data in the Instance Store (e.g. data not stored on any attached EBS volume including the root device) will no longer be available. Before we stop the instance, backup any data you may need, and launch a new machine which will come up with new underlying hardware, and put the data and services back.
• The public DNS name and the private IP address of the instance will change.
• If you associated an Elastic IP address with this instance, stopping this instance also disassociates the Elastic IP address from it. Once you start the instance, re-associate it with the Elastic IP address if the address is still required.
• For instances in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), the Elastic IP address and the private IP address remain unchanged.

Before you stop and restart an instance, perform the following tasks:

1. Retrieve any data from the Instance Store (e.g., data that is not stored on any attached EBS volumes including the root device) that you will need later. Because there is no stop option for this, you need to terminate it and launch a new machine.
2. Take a snapshot of your existing volume (storage charges will apply).
3. Note the necessary configuration data in case you will need it later, including the DNS public name and the private IP address.
4. Stop and restart your instance. For more information, see Stopping and Starting Instances
5. Re-associate an Elastic IP address if this address is necessary.
6. If other applications or instances rely on the public DNS name or the private IP address of this instance, update the information with the new configuration data.

Instance Reboot

An Instance Reboot is similar to a System Reboot except that a reboot of your instance is required rather than the underlying system. Because of this, we have the option of performing the reboot ourselves.  We may choose to perform the reboot ourselves to have more control and better integrate the reboot into our operational practices. When an instance is scheduled for an Instance Reboot, we can choose to issue an EC2 reboot (via the AWS Management Console, the EC2 APIs or using other management tools) before the scheduled time and the Instance Reboot will be completed at that time. If you do not reboot the instance via an EC2 reboot, your instance will be automatically rebooted during the scheduled time.

The Best practice for this is: Instead of rebooting an instance through API’s or Amazon AWS console, login to the instance, and issue reboot command. That will have more control on the reboot.

Retirement

Amzon will schedule an instance for retirement when it can no longer be maintained. This can happen when the underlying hardware has failed in a way that we cannot repair without damaging the instance. An instance that is scheduled for retirement will be terminated on or after the scheduled time. If you no longer need the instance, you can terminate it before its retirement date. If it is an EBS-backed instance, you can stop and restart the instance and it will be migrated to different hardware. You should stop/restart or replace any instance that is scheduled for retirement before the scheduled retirement date to avoid interruption to your application.

If instance’s root device is the Instance Storeand our instance is scheduled for retirement, we can opt to launch a replacement instance. After we have launched a replacement instance, we can terminate the original instance. If we choose to take this action, be aware that:

• The public DNS name and the private IP address of our replacement instance will differ from our original instance.

And we can perform the same steps for this Instance Retirement also like “System Reboot”.

API Calls Support

The new DescribeInstanceStatus function returns information about the scheduled events for some or all of our instances in a particular Region or Availability Zone. The following information is returned for each instance:

• Instance State – The intended state of the instance (pending, running, stopped, or terminated).
• Rebooting Status – An indication of whether or not the instance has been scheduled for reboot, including the scheduled date and time (if applicable).
• Retiring Status – An indication of whether or not the instance has been scheduled for retirement, including the scheduled date and time (if applicable).

Amazon will continue to send “degraded instance” notices to us via email to notify us of retiring instances.

AWS Console Support

We can view upcoming events that are scheduled for our instances in the EC2 tab of the AWS Management Console. The EC2 Console Dashboard contains summary information on scheduled events:

We can also click on the Scheduled Events link to view detailed information:

The instance list displays a new “event” icon next to any instance that has a scheduled event:

We believe Kinect is going to be an interesting and popular way to interact with devices – especially display devices. Today, the best way of interaction is in terms of touch screens but those entail physical proximity to the display device. So in a sense, Kinect is supposed to bring the same paradigm change that a remote control for a TV brought vs a TV mounted control (e.g. touch screens).

While Apple and others ran away with the touch screen device segment, we believe that Kinect is a device which will bring remote gestures and interactions closer to your home. So what are some of the startups / apps / uses this could spur –

a) Interacting with the OS for basic actions through Kinect
b) Voice + Kinect apps (Siri ++) – Imagine replying to chats, writing emails by voice (voice as a keyboard replacement)
c) Moving from a click based approach to a gesture based approach in app consumption
d) Niche apps in Healthcare, Transportation and other sectors
e) Great machine learning apps leveraging the gesture movements
f) In built Kinect sensors in TVs – inbuilt TV apps a la Samsung apps
g) Minority report becoming a reality

Is this going to spur on a new set of app development companies? Present app companies are woefully slow adapting, so this might be a good chance to start a great set of developers on a few cool products.

Some interesting links on the same topic -  

a) Open Kinect

b) Kinect App contest

c) MSDN blog on the same topic

d) Kinect SDK download

e) Kinect Patent

Apparently Microsoft has partnered with 200 developers to start developing innovative apps around Kinect – sure should be space to watch out for!

No brand can ever be sure what puts off or interests the customer. While established players leverage their position in the market and constantly make their presence felt through one or the other media, the smaller players always tread a dangerous path where a brand can quickly disappear into nothingness for a small mistake. Social media is no different and social CRM as a concept has consumer behavior as its backbone.

Ads on Social Media

Facebook has begun to categorize ads so the user knows which one is a sponsored ad. Companies advertising on the popular social medium should be extra careful while choosing the image and designing the caption as it needs to make an instant impression and grab attention. A photo of a woman in lingerie cannot sell everything though it is sure to get clicks. Google ads are gradually moving towards becoming annoying rather than interesting. However the massive reach of these ads can be a great tool to make your brand visible.

Social media monitoring/tracking is a great tool in CRM for understanding customer sentiments. Product launches, name changes, new appointments, expansion plans and all other news of the company and the public’s reception to the same has the right platform for analysis through such research.

Efficient choice?

One of the biggest advantages of the CRM through social media is that the platform is relatively cheap and sometimes even free of cost. While some experts may feel that it is the ultimate way to gauge free public opinion, there is however a tendency of the Facebook users to support or oppose a cause or a brand without personal experience with the same. This tendency makes social CRM a rather complicated concept where authenticity of the opinions may often be a question.

In the present global economic scenario, brands need to find CRM solutions that are not just cost effective but can also drive sales to keep the top-line and bottom-line intact. To find a CRM solution that gives an edge over competitors at not only the social level but also from business prospective is thus a major challenge for firms big and small. With research firms venturing into sectors such as social media monitoring, tracking and marketing, the options have definitely gone up today.

Target audience

One definite advantage of a social CRM is that firms can target its customers in a far more narrowed down and segmented manner. This is not possible in any other form of CRM as none of them are as interactive. One can expect feedback in seconds and therefore it is a tremendous tool for emerging players to design and modify their products and services accordingly. In terms of decision making the CRM solutions can provide not only specific data but also allow a great deal of insight into the public sentiments towards the product or service.

Google Plus has already announced the expected launch of a business platform which will help the latter segregate information for each department through the Circle mechanism. It is a matter of time before other players in the market also come up with solutions that can boost CRM for firms. In spite of the Google Wave project failing to make it big, a similar concept is bound to find more success with social media and cloud computing assuming such mythic proportions.

What’s your opinion?

[Guest article contributed by CRMnext team. Reproduced from the blog]

PromptCloud is one such Bangalore-based firm that provides large-scale data crawling and extraction, using cutting edge technologies and cloud computing solutions. It has a cloud based data acquisition platform which can aggregate data from the web and present it into desired format. The platform utilizes artificial intelligence programs to analyze BigData, which is too dispersed, unstructured, and awkward for conventional software tools to capture, manage, and process within a tolerable and finite time. Big Data requires a different set of skills, that every organization may not boast of. Also, since data is scattered across the web, streamlining desired data and extracting information from the same can be a tough job.

PromptCloud comes to the rescue in this case. They employ machine learning techniques to extract content from forums, social media, blogs, review sites and more. They have the capability to crawl verticals such as electronic goods, books, movies, hotels etc, and specialize both in deep crawl(extracting information from deepest pages of desired websites) and incremental crawl(newly updated data on desired sites on a regular basis), using technologies like Nutch, Hadoop, Lucene, Cassandra/Hbase, Machine Learning Techniques, and Distributed Computing.

PromptCloud was founded in 2009 by IIT and CMU alumni, having work experience in conglomerates like Google, Yahoo, and Adobe. They have been providing data services to a variety of clients from a range of domains including travel, finance, healthcare, marketing, analytics, and more. “It’s the ‘Big Data’ era, and with the heavy amount of data flowing on the cloud, there are heavier opportunities knocking at each of our doors. We just help our clients grab such opportunities by extracting the right data while they focus on their core competencies.“, says Prashant Kumar, founder PromptCloud.

As with any cloud computing solution, this has its own sets of pros and cons: you can reduce development and maintenance costs, focus on your core competencies, have a flexible pricing depending on the size and frequency of data, reliance on a third-party(PromptCloud) for your data.

PromptCloud can come in handy for pretty much anyone who deals with big data, including companies doing market research, aggregated review sites, travel domain sites, consumer-based firms, etc. With Cloud Adoption in India picking up rapidly and the total cloud spend in the private cloud market set to reach peak levels, such private cloud products have a bright future. Since PromptCloud crawls over specific pockets of data, their customized solutions are an advantage over mass data crawls, and provides faster and deeper results.

Do you want to process Big Data but weren’t able to find someone with the desired skills? Next time, give PromptCloud a try and let us know.

The much-hyped Aakash tablet’s pre-booking orders have crossed 14 lakh units and reports suggests that the INR 2,500/ priced tablet received almost 1 lakh pre-booking orders a day (since the company started accepting online pre-booking orders). While Indian media and the copy/paste bloggers have gone crazy with these numbers, an important point to keep in mind is that the online booking from the official site, i.e. http://www.akashtablet.com/ or http://www.ubislate.com/ needs only your name/email id and address to be considered a ‘successful pre-booking’.

That is,it is pre-ordering without any commitment to actually buy the device (no advance payment) – and that’s where you need to take the 14 Lakh number in the right context (reminds me of brainless stunt by Nokia India to sell its 500 millionth device).

In that context (of pre-booking), 14 lakh doesn’t really sound like a great number assuming 50% (at maximum) will have the actual intent to buy the device (one more thing: the booking form should have at least implemented de-duplication of email ids).

Note to ToI/ET Journo: Stop comparing iPad sales (of 10 lakh iPads in 28 days) to free pre-booking orders of Akash tablet. It’s the worst case of cooking vanity numbers.

RIM Sells 12,000 Playbooks

RIM slashed the price of its tablet, Playbook by 50% in India and as per this report, the company sold more than 12,000 devices in just four days.

Good sign or bad? Well, maybe that’s the real value of Blackberry’s Playbook tablet and time they stop competing with iPad and instead focus on building cheaper/affordable tablets.

Note to RIM: Get more ambitious. Steve Jobs would have fired all his sales team for such a poor performance.

iPad Mandatory for Students

In a recent circular, Mumabai’s Podar International School management informed parents that it has decided to introduce iPad2 in classrooms from the next academic year. While some parents welcomed the move, others feel the fancy tablet is not feasible for children.

The circular states, “We are pleased to announce that the decision taken by the school management of using Apple iPad2 in the classroom by the students has been welcomed by the parent community. Parents now have the choice of either purchasing the iPad2 from the school on an outright basis or avail of a finance scheme on offer. You also need to indicate if the iPad2 will be purchased by you on your own. You are requested to mark your choice… to take further steps to initiate the process and negotiate the bulk order purchase.”

Note to school: For a change, shall we focus on ‘creators’?

–

Recommended Read: Tablet Market in India: A Quick Recap [Price, Range,Features]

Is tablet revolution for real or we are way too doctored into believing that tablets will actually help improve education system. Isn’t tablet a media consumption device and not a creation device?

MIT’s OpenCourseWare Consortium is a community of over 250 universities and associated organizations worldwide committed to advancing OpenCourseWare sharing and its impact on global educational opportunity. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance formal and informal learning through the worldwide sharing and use of free, open, high-quality education materials organized as courses. Collectively, OCW Consortium members have published materials from more than 13,000 courses in 20 languages, available through the Consortium’s web site.

IITs also run a similar initiative called NPTEL (National Programme for Technology Enhanced Learning) and have made courses from IITs and IISC online via the youtube channel, NPTEL.

It´s the same technology that powers better known applications such as Google Wallet wherein mobile users with NFC enabled devices can pay for goods and services by tapping their mobile phones to the point-of-sale (POS) terminals at stores.

So let´s understand the technical and commercial aspects that drive NFC and what in our opinion is the driving force behind the technology.

In technical terms, NFC is a RF technology operating at 13.56 MHz and is based on inductive coupling wherein loosely coupled inductive circuits share power and data over a distance of few centimeters.

So to illustrate this with an example, you are walking down the street and see a poster of a movie you might want to check out. You walk up to the poster and touch your mobile phone to an NFC tag located on the poster and your browser automatically navigates to the movie´s trailer. In this case, on the NFC tag a command to navigate to a specific URL (written in NFC Data Exchange Format – NDEF) has been programmed onto it. So, when a NFC enabled mobile phone approaches the tag (at approximately 3 cms or less) the passive NFC tag on the poster is activated by the radio waves of the NFC antenna in the mobile phone and the information transfer takes place. You need no mobile app, like in the case of QR codes, for a NFC driven data exchange to take place. This makes the technology more intuitive, less clunky and easy-to-use.

On the commercial side, stakes are much higher than one can imagine. As a user you can obviously make things easier for yourself by simply tapping to share your favorite song or application or to quickly pay for a pack of chewing gum and run out the store. But behind all this is a ton of cash which incentivizes the value chain behind NFC. Let´s take the Samsung Nexus S NFC mobile phone as an example. Every mobile phone comes with a Secure element which can be embedded into the phone itself, a SIM card or microSD card allowing for secure transaction e.g. payments. In the Samsung Nexus S the secure element is embedded into the phone itself with Google not providing access, currently, to the secure element to external parties. So any secure transactions e.g. payments, are more or less driven or controlled by Google on that handset. Extrapolate this to the millions of NFC enabled phones are might be shipped out every year or to the increasing use of mobile for payments. This gives the party controlling the secure element tremendous power. And this why there is a “NFC war” between the likes of Google and mobile operators. Each side is building its consortiums, industry bodies etc. to out-run the other. But this is just a battle for a pie that is very big thereby testifying the commercial stakes of NFC. So whoever wins, will win big!

Another great use of NFC is for app developers who build NFC into their apps. Users can get access or basically buy an app when they see it on someone else´s mobile phone. No more – remember the name of the app, go to the app store and then pay and download. Remember mobile phone users for the lack of a better word are always-on-the-run. With NFC it is just seamless.

We tend to look at the technology from a user perspective and think the intuitiveness and ease of use of the technology is its biggest plus.

Although NFC is considered to be a sub-set or an extension to RFID in our minds that´s not exactly true, for us atleast. To begin with, RFID has a long range. So imagine your mobile phone that has your credit card info broadcasting this data up to 10 meters! Secondly, like explained above the usage of the secure element in NFC transactions allows for safer transactions for data transmission.

Having said that, the technology and the industry behind NFC is still small and in some countries even smaller. It´s adoptability is dependent on the wide availability of NFC enabled phones or SIM cards, and a common standard across geographies and devices. But for the moment, the rationale for its adoption is quite clear from a user perspective. The question is – will the industry big-weights get behind the technology for the common good or just be big bullies!

[About the author – Vaibhav Puri is the CEO and Founder of Taggito S.L., a NFC focused mobile technology, based out of Madrid, Spain. www.taggito.com. He is reachable on vaibhav@taggito.com]

Image credit:wikipedia

Maxthon 3 comes with a browser engine that draws web pages 200% faster than Google Chrome and offers useful free cloud services like storing bookmark/notes, screen grabs etc.

Most Popular Browser in India?

We recently covered few data points on most popular browser in India and Chrome was able to beat Firefox marginally.

Most Popular Browser in India

Chrome rose to the top by taking a mainstream route (TV/Print advertising) – do you think Maxthon can stand as a big threat owing to its ‘faster than Chrome’ positioning?

Also see: India Has 2nd Largest Opera Mini Userbase in the World

Mujjo’s touchscreen compatible winter gloves work with all capacitive touchscreen devices including (but not limited to) your iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Samsung, HTC, LG or whatever touch screen phone you’re using.

Capacitive touchscreens work by sensing the conductive properties of your skin. Mujjo gloves are made of high-quality silver-coated nylon fibers knitted into the fabric of the glove. This silver-coated nylon fibers make the gloves conductive and therefore touchscreen compatible!

Regular touchscreen gloves functionality is restricted to one or two fingertips. Mujjo touchscreen gloves enable you to use all your fingertips, your knuckles and even the heel or the palm of your hand.

An interesting product, the Mujjo Touchscreen gloves are available for € 24,95 and is soon launching in India. We will share our review of the gloves, once we get our hands on them.

Watch this intro video of Mujjo gloves

While in some states over 3 in every 10 engineers are employable in IT Services industry, this falls drastically to less than 1 in every 10 of the engineers in some states. This dramatic fall in employability standards across states is a disturbing situation. Not only is this detrimental to the education standards and economy of the country, but creates social risks of frustration among ‘qualified’ engineers. The strong correlation of poor employability to the number of colleges in a state show how states are concentrating on quantity rather than quality.”Regionally, it is observed that employability in IT services companies is highest among Engineers in the North, followed by East, then West and then South.

- In the North, Delhi, the National winner leads the pack, closely followed by Uttarakhand and Punjab.
- East sees Bihar leading with highest employability followed by West Bengal and Orissa.
- West sees Gujarat setting benchmarks with the highest employability, Madhya Pradesh follows in Central India.
- Kerala emerges with highest employability in the South, followed by Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

In India, there is a concentration of engineering colleges in a few states. The report looked at the ranking of states considered as ‘engineering hubs’ by employability in IT Services sector. It is observed that states with more Governmentt colleges as compared to Private colleges fare better on employability.

Employability by Metros

Delhi (north) shows highest employability percent followed by Kolkata (East), cities in the West and the lowest employability figures were observed in colleges in Southern cities. The skew in employability is quite high, for instance, the IT product employability in Delhi in as high as 1 in every 9 candidates and as low as 1 in every 200 in Chennai.

Even though Bengaluru has similar IT Services’ employability as compared to other Southern and Western cities, it shows much higher employability for IT product companies. This indicates that candidates in Bengaluru do much better at computer programming and algorithms even though they show similar English and cognitive skills.

The study was done by AspiringMinds, employability measurement company, headquartered in Gurgaon.

• Skype’s over 500 million users as compared to over 700 million of Facebook.
• Skype’s revenue of $860 million in 2010 as compared to $1.86 Billion of Facebook.
• Facebook operates on Web, Skype is mostly Desktop based!

Here the 3rd point is distinctive. Skype is aligned with Microsoft in the Desktop Service space and hence made a perfect sense for Microsoft.

A few possibilities for Skype:

• Desktop Software as a Service: Skype may be part of Windows distributions being a Microsoft Software. People will not be needing to install it and will ship with Windows. Will Microsoft charge for the service in the same way? May be. Microsoft will have an App store for Desktop Software – May be!
• Gaming Platform: Tencent has a key product which is called QQ Messenger. Tencent is bigger than Facebook in userbase and generated $3 Billion in revenue in 2010. Microsoft is already working in this direction.
• The worst Case: As Adobe keeps improving the Flash platform and HTML5 keeps coming – it is becoming easier to implement voice and video calling over the Web. This renders the Skype’s FREE features redundant. The future will belong to web. Skype can still live as part of Microsoft world but won’t be growing much.

It looks like Skype will need to keep pushing the envelope in QQ Messenger’s direction. After all, Kool kids of tomorrow might not really like to download something to make calls.

What do you think is the future of Skype?

[Guest article by Rajan Chandi, founder of Boomchat, a service that launched during Pluggd.in Hackathon. Reproduced from Boomchat’s blog.]

Some of these key measures (important sections are highlighted):

- To facilitate setting up of Semiconductor Wafer Fabs and its eco-system for design and fabrication of chips and chip components.
-  To provide Preferential Market Access for domestically manufactured/designed electronic products including mobile devices, SIM cards with enhanced features, etc. with special emphasis on Indian products for which IPR reside in India to address strategic and security concerns of the Government consistent with international commitments.
-  To create an “Electronic Development Fund” to promote innovations and IP and R&D, commercialization of products, etc in ESDM, nano-electronics and IT sectors by providing appropriate funding/incentives to industry/academic/R&D institutions.
-  To provide incentives for setting up of over 200 Electronic Manufacturing Clusters (EMCs) with world-class logistics and infrastructure and easy to do business facilities.
-  To provide attractive fiscal incentives across the value chain of ESDM sector through a Modified Special Incentive Package Scheme (M-SIPS) to eliminate the disability costs in manufacturing on account of infrastructure gaps relating to power, transportation, etc and to mitigate the relatively high cost of finance, etc.
-  To set up a National Electronics Mission (NEM) with industry participation to evolve programmes in pursuit of the laid down policies and also to create institutional mechanism to advance the implementation of various programmes aimed at achieving the objectives enumerated in this policy and to promote as un Electronic Hardware Manufacturing Hub and suitably market “Brand India” in electronics.
- To encourage the usage of LED lighting solutions especially in rural markets through innovative products like solar LED lamps, public places like street lighting, traffic lights etc. to promote the manufacture of LED and LED lights.
- To build manufacturing capacity of solar photo-voltaics to support the generation of 20 GW of solar power by 2020.

The draft Policy proposes to achieve the turnover of electronic system design and manufacturing sector to USD 400 billion by 2020.

- Download draft copy of National Policy on Electronics 2011 (pdf).

While hackathons are not entirely new to India, I reckon it is safe to suggest that hackathon organizers are still figuring out how to attract a bunch of developers to develop some meaningful applications over the course of a weekend that they could have otherwise spent as they deemed fit. It is a rather daunting task. Specially so, if there are no clearly spelled out incentives – monetary, help in productizing an app, etc. In light of these realities, I think there is plenty an organizing team could and should do to ensure that all the stakeholders – sponsors, developers, partners, and volunteers, enjoy the event and look forward to a future edition. It is worthwhile to consider these aspects before organizing a hackathon:

- Have a clear objective: It is not uncommon to see members of the organizing team trying to steer the themes of the hackathon based on their own personal interests. In addition, sponsors might want to further their interests and need to be managed well.

- Involve volunteers: The success of a hackathon is contingent on the active participation of a large army of volunteers. It helps to choose a diverse set of volunteers who are passionate about technology and will take ownership of the event.

- Socialize theme / topics: One of the big mistakes organizers commit is to ignore developer feedback when choosing a theme for the event. Socializing the planned themes will help gauge the interest levels among the target audience and refine them or change them.

- Engage continually: It is important to engage the developer community continually in the run-up to the event. Successful hackathons have been able to generate conversations among interested developers. It also helps the developers to prepare – explore ideas, form teams. Without a medium to engage, a lot of time is wasted on the day of the event in finding teammates, freezing on ideas. Even an elementary comment thread or bulletin board should serve the purpose.

- Use social media to your advantage: Create a Facebook page, twitter handle and even a Google+ page if you will and get some positive word of mouth for the event. The hackathon I referred to earlier in the article did not even have a presence on Facebook! It is equally important to regularly update these channels.

- Developers are the best judges: While it is perfectly okay to suggest use cases or broad problems that developers could build on, it is best to let developers use their imagination in creating something new. After all, a hackathon should seek to serve as a platform for creative thinking and problem solving.

- Get food on the table: While free t-shirts are good, some food would go a long way in mitigating dwindling energy levels. It also serves to cut out the distraction of having to take a long break.

Addressing these aspects is just a start. Chances are you will likely face several other challenges in organizing an event of this nature. It would be great if people who have organized hackathons, successfully or otherwise, could share their thoughts. You can leave your thoughts or suggestions in the comments below.

[Guest article by Shashank P S. The author’s views are personal. The author can be reached on twitter @shashank_ps.]

This is what I wrote

Few years back when BigAdda was at its spending best, they partnered with Rock-on movie and ‘tried’ getting the crew to share/talk about the movie on BigAdda. You know what happened? The entire RockOn team was conversing on Facebook and not on BigAdda, even though they had an official partnership with the desi social network.

Conversation happens naturally to places and networks which we are used to.

Now coming back to Google Plus, I see the same challenge. SRK is still tweeting more and plussing less.

The Reality of Plus

While it’s a known phenomena that some (maybe all?) celebrities employ social media agencies to tweet on their behalf, but SRK’s social media has gone miles ahead and have started copying tweets directly from SRK’s twitter handle, which I believe is used by SRK himself.

And SRK has now even renamed the handle to “Team SRK”, i.e. outsourced the copy/paste job to a social media agency.

What’s the Big Deal here?

Google tried buying conversation, but this is the damn reality

- If you really want to follow SRK as-he-shares, you should follow him on Twitter.

- If you want to be SRK’s friend, add him on Facebook (or subscribe to public updates).

- If you <fill in the blanks>, add him on Google+.

The challenge is filling those blanks. Why would one add him on Google+? What do I ‘expect’ him to share on the new new social network by Google?

Updates from his social media agency? That’s certainly crap.

And this should be an eye-opener for Google+ team.

If I were the product head of Google+ team, I’d immediately stop all the campaigns and do a rethink of marketing. Is the product sticky enough for people to use it? If not, then something is fundamentally missing in the product.

Moreover, do people find Google+ ‘useful’ enough for them to converse here?

The answer, currently is a BIG NO! Google hasn’t got Plus (points) yet, but this desperation to bring traffic/registered users has dwarfed the long-term goal. And its just not SRK, even Priyanka Chopra has joined Google+ and well, her account is managed by ‘Team PC’.

Talk of mediocrity and Google+ name pops up – so do not be surprised if Google decides to kill Google+ within the next 6-7 months. To me, Google+ doesn’t (yet) has fundamental soul to itself [read: Entrepreneurs : Define What’s Non-Negotiable. Define a Soul.] and is just an interesting case study for entrepreneurs.

What’s your opinion?

{Recommended Read: Google–A company going through mid-life crisis?}

However end-user organizations, which include small or midsize businesses (SMBs), public sector units (PSUs) and the government sector, have started looking at cloud offerings and the benefits they can get from adopting cloud-based solutions. Government is also supporting cloud adoption to help/encourage small business get maximum benefit/support and cost saving to strength its business.

Recently, Hitachi announced plans to introduce cloud services offerings for SMEs in Gujarat, which accounts 10% of the three million-odd small and medium enterprises in India. SMEs in Gujarat are looking at data backup and email management services, along with data and business analysis by cloud solution providers. Sunil Chavan, Director, Software Group & Cloud solutions, Asia Pacific, Hitachi Data Systems notes they are sure about getting quick penetration there. Once that happens, they will look to offer cloud services to SMEs in other states later.

Tata Communications, too, has announced plans to target about 30 per cent of the 380,000 small and medium scale units across Gujarat for the adoption of its recently-launched cloud services. The company has launched two new products, InstaApps and InstaCompute, as part of its cloud services, expanding its cloud services portfolio.

According to an IDC survey, cloud solutions industry is around $400 million currently and is expected to grow 10 times to $4-4.5 billion by 2015 in India. With huge demand and need of cloud services to manage the data, email growth and backup, Indian small and midsized business is expected to pick up the pace with the changing technology and constant up gradation.

Companies in India are still not fully aware of or convinced about the benefits of the cloud models available today. Some have heard of the benefits, but want to see real case studies before committing to any investment in this area. Hitachi cloud offering deal would make awareness among other SME’s and encourage adoption. Cloud computing services are most likely to benefit those SMEs which have higher requirement of storage and processing of data.

Also see: Eucalyptus Cloud to Remotely Provision e-Governance Applications In India [Open Source Wins]

Analysis: Cloud Adoption In India–A 101 on Concerns And Facts

Data: Private Cloud Market In India–Total Cloud Spend Expected To Reach 8.2%

“Good or Great Idea” is a place where you can post ideas for new products or services and also crowdsource an idea/support for improving an existing product or service without paying anything. The product and service could be an idea for developing an application like iPhone app, Android app, or new products line like tablets or phones.  It can be any innovation technology/services for cloud, web-based service, enterprise software, or any industry specific business line like clothing line, home-care product,s furniture, electronics, medical equipment, consumer products, automotive, etc.

On Good or Great Idea, you can share as much detail as you would like, per you choice and convenience. Besides the idea description, you have the option to provide additional information. You can also control who can read your ideas – If you would like maximum exposure and earn maximum points, you can make your idea public OR If you want only selected people to be able to read your ideas, post your ideas to a group that you either created or are a member of. So you have the option to discuss your idea only with people you trust, by being ‘Friends’ with them through a small link on their profile page.

You can earn points by a judge point for every idea that your rate, earn a collaborator point for every constructive comment, and earn innovator points for not only posting an idea, but also get awarded points every time someone rates your idea. Invite your friends to rate your idea. The more people you invite, the more points you can earn. At the end, this point system allows you to stand out from your peers and gain world-wide recognition. Top innovators and judges are listed on the front page. By actively posting and rating ideas, you get an opportunity to get your name out in front of all the visitors to this site, though I would not be surprised if this is goes on to be just another Klout score.

The main motive or attraction of posting an idea at Good or Great Idea is to get a platform where you can evaluate your thoughts, solicit feedback, and get different views that would add value in execution. At the same time, you can track interesting ideas posted by others and contact an innovator directly. This place can help you find an investor/venture capitalist, who may see your idea, like it, and offer to invest in it, also find people who have the skills and interest to help you turn your dream into reality. You get introduced to like-minded people who have a common taste and share a common passion, and are interested to work on your ideas, geographical barriers notwithstanding.

“This site could help further accelerate the pace of innovation in India. As more people start using it, more interesting ideas will see the light of the day, instead of remaining locked in people’s heads.” says Mohammed Guller, founder of Good or Great Idea, headquartered in California.

The site looks like a Good idea. Or maybe Great. What do you think? Would you like to share your entrepreneurial ideas in a bid to get them evaluated? Would you seek out interested people or ideas using Good or Great Idea? Can this site help you transform an idea from being good to a great one? Let us know in the comments.

Below are my views on what I believe are the 10 biggest challenges Google is facing right now and why it might be a tough-time forward for the Internet giant. Flip through the presentation below or read the long post below.

1. Search

Yes – Search. Google’s core product is facing threat from another format of search: Real-Time Search.

Google continues to add more capabilities to index real-time information to its search algorithms; but fails to realize that traditional web-index based search is different from real-time search. Last year (April 2010), in its caffeine update Google claimed to provide 50% more fresher results. Nov 2011 it rolled out another set of changes to its search algorithms that affects 35% of all search queries. Again same month, it was discovered that Google started indexing comments on Facebook.

In real-time search, the context in which the information retrieved is no longer valid after sometime. In case of Twitter it does not last beyond a day. Or a week? Same with Facebook. At this same point while consumer search for this information on Google – it is impossible to figure out the context of that search query – real-time info or traditional.

Example. Apple launches its next smartphone – iPhone 5. Consumers looking for “smartphone” on Google Search are shown iPhone 5 results, even when they are not looking for it.

Methods of information indexing, querying, trending, and even consumer mindset for real-time search are different than traditional search. Google may end up killing product experience of Traditional web search with such attempts.

Content index based web search & real-time information search are different products. If Google intends to capture a mind-share of Real-Time web search; it needs to build a different product.

2. The Rise of Discovery Platforms

For years, Search was our only means to discover websites, content, products, services. Google was our gateway to the Internet.

Today, with social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and similar; consumers are discovering more and relevant websites, content, products or services. They come to us with recommendations, shares, comments from our contacts – and are more relevant. Interpret this as – Google is no longer the only discovery mechanism.

User adoption for Social Networks is increasing; they continue to have high mindshare and also consumers are spending more time on social platforms today. In addition to this, a whole new wave of innovative products are launched on top of Social Graphs enabling contextual discovery.

Social discovery methods are threat to Search.

3. Social

After 750+ Mn users on Facebook, 380+ Mn on Twitter, 115+ Mn on LinkedIn; Google now does understand the importance of having a Social Product.

Its earlier attempts – Orkut, Buzz, Wave failed. It is making a big push with Google+, trying to create a new Social Graph, without realizing that they are already established.

Social Graphs are reflection of our Social Relationships in real world. And they are:

• Close Relationships: Facebook
  Family, Friends – People you know personally!
• Professional Relationships: LinkedIn
  Colleagues, Partners, Business Relationships
• Loose Relationships – Twitter
  Celebrities, Domain Experts. People you know, but they may not know you.

There is no room for creation of another graph. And for Google+, I strongly believe that it will fail again as it is still miles away from being a great social product.

On other hand – Spotify, Netflix, Hulu and many other products and startups are riding the Facebook Open Graph / Social Graph to increase social engagement and usage. While Google is missing the opportunity by not leveraging Facebook’s reach for its own products like YouTube, Google News and similar.

Social is not in Google’s DNA.

4. Continued Fascination with Google+

The rule to build successful products is – “Build quickly, learn, build, deploy. Doesn’t work, discard. Start again.” Google taught us this rule; and is now breaking it again and again.

Google should rather focus on building Google+, showing users the value proposition in this platform. Instead it is doing its biggest mistake – forcefully including Google+ in its other products. And in this process killing the user experience and usability of its successful products.

• Search:  Introduced Google+ profiles of users who shared respective URL in search results.
• Adwords:  Introduced the +1 button to Adwords display advts.
• YouTube: Introduced videos shared by Google+ users on YouTube homepage.
• Gmail: Introduced notifications on Google+ updates on Gmail header toolbar.
• Google Reader: Introduced sharing options, adding users to Circles from Google Reader.

In any of the above products, Google+ additions are not enabling any core-feature of the main product. These would have been great things to do if Google+ had proved its own value to users. Google is simply leveraging successful products to promote Google+.

Didn’t Yahoo try his before – everything Yahoo. I didn’t work earlier, it will not work now.

5. Fixing whats not broken

Google wants to act fast and speed up its innovation. While doing this, it is actually fixing whats not broken.

Gmail -

• The new design update Google is planning to push to all its users – is uncalled for. The functional updates are great thing to do, but the changes to its look are at the expense of product usability and could have been avoided.
• Google announced launch of a very buggy version of its Gmail client for iOS; and recalled the same from app stores within hours.
• Stops support for native Blackberry App. While Blackberry itself is on a decline, it still has a significant 19.7% share in US smartphone market and continues to grow in countries like India.

Search -

• Started with its Caffeine roll-out in June 2010 to include fresh content.
• In Nov 2011 – it pushed another big roll-out that impacts 35% of search queries.
• Labnol discovered that Google is now indexing Facebook comments.

In search of freshness, Google is playing too much with its core search product. As mentioned earlier in this post, Real-Time search needs to be a different product.

Google Maps -

• Announced pricing for Maps API High-volume usage.
• Location is a key to future product innovation on top of Maps. This move is likely to affect a lot of startups innovating on top of Google Maps.

YouTube -

• Homepage displays videos from People you follow on Google+

Google is also implementing design standardizations across all products – Search, Gmail, Reader, News, Books and more others. Google is killing uniqueness of its products by standardizing its look and feel and continuing with its fascination of Google+.

6. Siri

It may not be easy for anyone to dismiss Siri as a feature on iPhone 4S. Siri is not just voice recognition; it is another input methodology. Siri’s natural language interaction is far more superior than the syntax driven VA (Voice Actions for Android). VA is anywhere between 1-2 years behind Siri. That is a (HUGE) advantage Apple holds.

As the technology improves, one can start talking to Siri as -

• “Siri, search for ‘MP3 Player’, take me to the best result!”
• “Siri, show me the map of Mumbai.”
• “Siri, who is offering the lowest flight ticket from Mumbai to London.”

There are infinite possibilities what Siri can develop into quickly. Most importantly – the potential it holds can make many Google products and services around it irrelevant, like -

• Search – Ability to discover new websites and relevant services without using Google Search.
• Adwords – Google relies on clicks for monetization. Siri means no clicks, just talking.
• Maps – No longer view maps while driving, Siri will look up to them and speak out the directions.
• SEO – What happens to the SEO ecosystem around Search? Will the new optimization be SVO (Siri Voice Optimization)? How will it work?

Google mastered the standard text-input methodology on Internet (Computers + Mobile). But the threat from Siri is Real. Of all challenges Google faces, Siri is the biggest. The last known big transition for input methodology was finger-based touch inputs (introduced with iPhone). In last couple of years, it replaced traditional keypads on all smartphones.

Siri should be a big bouncer to folks at Google; caught them off-guard and completely unprepared.

7. Android v/s iOS

Google scores a big thumbs up with Android capturing 43% of US smartphone market. Apple lost opportunity in developing countries due to its high-priced iPhones while Android phones & tablets flooded the markets with price points from $75 to $1000.

In my own view – I find Google strategy to enter smartphone market extremely fascinating. Samsung, Motorola, HTC, LG and many others were excellent hardware manufacturers with poor software / applications / user experience capabilities compared with Apple or even Nokia. Google gave what these partners lacked – an mobile operating system and ecosystem of applications.

Distribution of Android phones provided Google the opportunity to monetize the mobile search queries. Current trends in mobile are slightly more inclined towards building Apps & HTML5 websites, most developers and product companies want to ensure a seamless experience on phone and also presence with a native client. Google also aligning itself by directing mobile publishers to Adsense and enabling AdMob for Mobile applications.

Google acquired Motorola Mobility to debut itself as an Software+Hardware play (like Apple?). But it may have limited or no advantage with its own hardware play (through Motorola) as it will face tough questions from global Android partners like Samsung, HTC, Sony, LG and others who are responsible for large distribution of Android OS and its popularity. For now, the Apple dream may look difficult.

There are also few more challenges facing the Android ecosystem -

• Apple still largest and extremely focused contender with its one-phone market strategy for iPhone
• Android being open; Consumers have a huge choice for Android phones from $75 to $750.
• Only differentiation between Android phones are hardware capabilities; hardware edge is tough to maintain.
• Brands like Samsung, HTC, others will require to have devices at all price-points to ensure growing market share. Only significantly high volumes will bring profits.
• Tough competition on price from Chinese and low-cost android phone manufacturers.

8. Monetization

2004: Google’s largest contributor to its Revenue: Adwords
2011: Google’s largest contributor to its Revenue: Adwords

In 2004, Advertising was only large scalable online monetization model. In the quarter Google debuted on Nasdaq; Amazon reported profit of just $54 Mn.

In 2011, there are various scalable monetization models:

• Online Advertising / Search & Display (Google)
• Online Advertising / Social (Facebook, LinkedIn & similar)
• Mobile Advertising (Google, InMobi & others)
• Local Advertising (Groupon, Foursquare & similar)
• eCommerce (Amazon & others)
• Enterprise, CRM (Salesforce, Box.net & others)
• App Stores (Apple)
• SaaS Products (Dropbox, Evernote, others)
• Payments (PayPal, Square, others)
• Smart Computing Devices / Tablets, Kindle, Smartphones (Apple, Amazon, others)

Multiple scalable monetization models evolved over last few years. Google unfortunately has not moved beyond Adwords.

9. Lack of Innovation

Over years, Google is struggling with innovation. Many existing and high potential products are on decline.

• Blogger: Introduced the world to blogging. Lost battle to WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous.
• Google Books: eBooks store of the World? eBook for Android phones?
• Google Docs: Never really went beyond Gmail attachments. Evernote? Box.net?
• Google News: News recommendation service or aggregation. Pulse?
• Google Apps: Endless opportunities in Enterprise services.

Google also abandoned or mis-managed on some the big ideas -

• Chromebook:
  Post launch announcements, not much has been heard about Chromebook project. If Chromebooks were built to optimize over web, why did it not follow the Android platform? Ideally it should have built and optimized version of Android for laptops & tablets (Android 3.1 Honeycomb for tablets came much later).
• Orkut:
  Google never realized the potential of Social until too late. Orkut which could have been the default Social Networking destination for world, never innovated beyond UI changes and probably never got the resources that it deserved.
• GDrive:
  Google was to launch an online drive for storage back in 2007; much ahead of Dropbox’s launch. The project was abandoned and Google is reportedly working on its revival once again post Dropbox’s success.

Over years multiple products have evolved that Google has not paid attention to. Some of the hottest startups and businesses today are in product domains like – Multiple SaaS domains, Social Commerce, Social Products, Local Businesses and so on.

10. Failure to execute Acquisitions

If you can’t build it, acquire it. Google has done some awesome job with many of its acquisitions, but unfortunately not the ones in Social. The big lost opportunities here are Aardvark, Dodgeball and Jaiku.

• Jaiku:
  An micro-blogging service that launched well before Twitter and acquired by Google in Oct 2007 had the potential to be Twitter or a tough competition. Twitter today has over 380+ Mn users and valued at an estimated $8 Bn.
• Aardvark:
  An social QnA service created before Quora was acquired by Google for $50Mn in Feb 2010 had enough time to learn and innovate. Google announced its closure in Sept 2011. Lost opportunity – Quora is now valued at over $1 Bn.
• Dodgeball:
  One of the earliest location based social products for mobile was acquired by Google in 2005 and discontinued in 2009. Dodgeball’s founder Dennis Crowley launched Foursquare which is one of the hottest location based products today with over 10 Million users.

Ending Notes

Design standardizations that kill identity of products. Inability to build competitive products and match speed of innovation. Failed attempts at Social Networking. Fascination to promote / push Google+ through its successful products. Failed acquisitions.

Google is currently showing all signs of being the next Yahoo. At this pace, engineers will sense more challenges and opportunities to innovate outside of Google. Its not too late, but yes – Google is in its mid-life crisis.

Concluding Notes for myself and other startups – “Don’t try to do something in everything. Rather focus on doing everything in something.”

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[About the author: Guest article by PJ, entrepreneur building a Social Product in stealth mode. Article reproduced from his blog.]

Img credit:Blue Square Thing/Flickr

How does crawling work?

In the nineties, all webmasters needed to do was submit the address of a page to the various engines which would send a spider to crawl that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed. Today’s crawlers are more advanced and do not rely on humans to submit pages, rather automatically navigate pages frequently, the frequency depending on that of change of pages, among other things. When a search engine’s web crawler visits a web page, it reads the visible text, hyperlinks, and content of the various tags used in the site, such as keyword rich meta tags. Using the information gathered from the crawler, a search engine will then determine what the site is about and index the information. The website is then included in the search engine’s database and its page ranking process.

Googlebot and deep crawling

Googlebot is Google’s web crawling robot, which finds and retrieves pages on the web and hands them off to the Google indexer, which helps return relevant results from the entire web in a matter of seconds. The Googlebot functions much like the web browser: it sends a request to a web server for a web page, downloads the entire page, then hands it off to Google’s indexer, using an algorithmic process to determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.
When Googlebot fetches a page, it culls all the links appearing on the page and adds them to a queue for subsequent crawling. By harvesting links from every page it encounters, Googlebot can quickly build a list of links that can cover broad reaches of the web. This technique, known as deep crawling, also allows Googlebot to probe deep within individual sites. Because of their massive scale, deep crawls can reach almost every page on the WWW. Because the web is vast, this can take some time, so some pages may be crawled only once a month.

Other uses of crawling

Preparing indexes to be used for search is not the only application crawlers find; they can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a website such as checking links or validating (rendered) HTML code.
Linguists may use a web crawler to perform a textual analysis; i.e., they may comb the Internet to determine what words are commonly used today. Market researchers may use a web crawler to determine and assess trends in a given market.
There are numerous nefarious uses of web crawlers as well, they can be used to gather specific types of information from webpages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses. Such crawlers are called email spambots, twitter bots or forum bots depending on what they crawl upon.

SEO and crawling

Increasing the rate of crawling is one of the ways for Search Engine Optimization, and making your pages appear higher on search results. The higher rate can be obtained by updating the content of your site regularly, ensuring a fast server response, adding a sitemap, and getting more back links from regularly crawled sites. However, you cannot force Googlebot, or any other crawler, to visit your site more often, you can only invite them hoping they would oblige..