Gizmo all set to take on Skype

Michael Robertson of the MP3.com and Lindows/Linspire fame is all set to take on Skype with his Gizmo Project as part of his new venture SIPPhone.

How Gizmo compares to Skype is yet to be seen. A couple of links from the Gizmo site suggest that the argument leans slightly towards the Gizmo camp at the moment.

Where Gizmo does score over Skype is that it uses the open SIP Protocol in comparison to the proprietary technology used by Skype.

Though Gizmo is unlikely to make any immediate dent on Skype, its definitely likely to give Skype a run for its money on the long run.

Ojos : Revolutionizing Image Search

A product thats likely to be launched very soon, Ojos may revolutionize image search on the web.

It certainly does not sound like a new concept, with many sites like flickr, Picasa already offering services that let you upload, organize and search images.

The key differences seem to lie in the way Ojos is going about doing it. They are relying on two main technologies :face and text recognition. The software according to a couple of blogs that i did get to read, lets you tag your images. It then searches/recognises other pictures of yours and tags them for you.
Aptly named Ojos, which is spanish for "Eyes", it seems to be doing a great job of recognising different pictures of the same person, according to early demos.

It certainly sounds like a product many of us would like to use. What remains to be seen is how much of whats been said is actually going to be made available?

You can catch the latest on the Ojos front on Munjal Shah's blog(the founder of Ojos), which he calls recognizing Deven(his son), seemingly suggesting what ojos is capable of doing.

AJAX

Internet based applications are here to stay, some of them competing and outperforming their rival desktop based applications.

Innovations in web designing have thrown open platforms to developers that have no relation to the underlying OS’s. This is pretty much in line with Jason Kottke’s ideas.

Asynchronous Javascript and XML, a programming technique that’s more commonly referred to as AJAX has tremendously improved the way these web based applications interact with data, thereby dramatically improving the performance of these applications.

With AJAX, some of the major limitations of traditional web based applications, like page refreshes in order to update data on the page, can be avoided.

Some of the applications that have been creating waves, like Google’s Gmail, Google Maps etc run on AJAX.

Microsoft will soon be making an entry into this playground with its own AJAX toolbox, which is called Atlas, for ASP.net users to build web based applications. However we can expect Atlas to be hooked up to the Windows OS.

Yeh Dil Maange More!!!

Not being able to use the Google Talk service through my office firewall, I could barely wait to try it out on the weekend.

And when i did get it working at home and a friend with whom i could try the service out, i felt absolutely handicapped with many of the basic features that we've been used to in IM's missing in Google Talk. It has a neat interface and the works. But it does leave you a tad disappointed.

And "Yeh Dil maange more" also from the English Cricket team. We want one more!!!
The Ashes has come live again after a long long time.

The way this series is going we are likely to see yet another mock obituary:

In Affectionate Remembrance
of
AUSTRALIAN C R I C K E T,
which died at the Oval
on
12th SEPTEMBER, 2005,
Deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing friends and acquaintances
R.I.P.
N.B. - The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to England.

For the uninitiated. It was this mock Obituary in 1982 which led to the legend of the "Ashes"!!

Clean Bowled!!!

With Australia being asked to follow-on in the Ashes Test, a first in the last 17 years of Ashes, the crowds werent exactly enjoying their Saturday night party. With plenty of booze in the air and some added adrenalin thrown in thanks to the state of affairs on the circket field, we were trying to make ourself as scarce as possible as we made our way back home from Vinayak's place.

As we got onto Exhibition Street from Bourke Street, two aussie girls walked past us discussing some dance steps. They walked past us and the next thing we heard them sing left us absolutely speechless.

"Ude jaise hawaen Sanan sanan, ude jaise parinde gagan gagan...." ... In pretty much flawless hindi!!!

Where is Google headed?

Over the last few weeks we have seen quite a lot written about Google and Microsoft.

Google Eath Vs MSN Virtual Earth
Google Homepage vs MSN Start Page

Google and Microsoft seem to have their own views of the internet world of tomorrow.

While Microsoft has been consolidating its position in the PC market by bundling a variety of information organisation/management tools along with its OS making the entire package extremely attractive, Google seems to have its own plans for tomorrow.

Google’s mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. And in keeping with its mission statement it has been coming out with applications that do just that and have been providing these for free. For every application that MS bundles along with its OS, Google seems to have on offer an application that does exactly that for absolutely free.

In doing so, Google is gradually sucking the life out of the Microsoft OS. What it aims to leave behind is just an OS that manages the hardware. With all other services being made available for free by Google and others like Yahoo, Mozilla etc, MS would find it difficult to make the entire package look like an attractive proposition.

Robert Young in a guest post on Om Maliks blog GigaOm, explains in detail what he thinks is Google's Strategy to make Microsoft obsolete.

Jason Kottke in his blog talks about OS Mutations that are likely to happen in the near future.

He talks about an OS based on the Web which he refers to as WebOS.
The System would have 3 main parts

1. A Browser
2. Web Applications and
3. A local Web Server : which would serve content from the local machine to the browser.

So apart from the web browser and the web server, all applications will be coded for the WebOS and not for any specific OS like Windows or Linux.

With Yahoo's acquisition of konfabulator and Google's release of its Desktop Search, we certainly seem to be heading in this direction!!!

Weekend, Athadu and a Birthday!!!

Come weekend and Indianmasti were back in action with a Desi movie in Chinatown Cinema. The flavour of the week was Telugu.

The 'gang' had decided to accompany our 'Golti'(GB's as we TB's/MB's prefer to call them) friend Praveen to the movie. For reasons inexplicable i decided to join the 'gang' though i dont understand a single word of Telugu. Not the brightest of decisions that i have taken. But i have been happy to dismiss it away as one of my 'moments' of stupidity. We all have 'em.
Anyways we did have our share of fun.

The entire hall was filled with GB's. GB's chattering away in Telugu. GB's hooting for Mahesh Babu. GB's whistling away for Trisha. GB's laughing away at Telugu Jokes. GB's taking sly glances at the opposite sex. GB's eating spicy 'molaga bhajji's'. Man, it was a full house.

In the end, we had great fun and Babu!!! movie chaala bagundhi.
Athadu had rocked!!!

Birthday parties seem to get people's blood boiling. I suspect some even managed to do a few extra sit ups that day in preparation for the evening.
Subbu took charge of the evening, preparing a smashing dinner. Despite it being a working day the next day People came, we cut a cake and they kicked ass. We'll go anywhere to kick ass!!! Wont we?? It was a smashing evening. Thanks guys!!

And meanwhile, I managed to turn a year older. Sigh!!

Google Launches Google Talk

Google followed up its launch of the Google Desktop with the Google Talk, Googles IM Client.

This much talked about IM client as expected supports the popular Jabber IM Standard and can exchange messages with other clients supporting the standard XMPP Protocol like Trillian, GAIM, iChat, Adium, and Psi. Google says it will soon support MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger.

Though they claim that Google Talk will work across Firewalls, I havent been successful as yet in getting it to work across the firewall at my office. :(

Google Talk looks lean and mean. Its clean, with no unnecessary graphics or ads. It looks all set to take on MSN, Yahoo and anybody else.

So guys check it out!!!

Google Desktop !!!!

Google today launched Google Desktop Search with a new componenet "The Google Sidebar"!!!

Ofcourse, it has replaced the "Desktop Sidebar" software that i have been using. Not a change thats going to last for long though or so it seems...

It has a new sidebar component which apparently is inspired by Windows Vista. The sidebar lets you check stock prices, weather, news, snaps et al. It also comes with a plug-in that allows you to check your mail straight from your outlook inbox.

The downside being that the user has very few options or preferences that he can set. I havent been able to categories and view my feeds according to sites. I dont seem to have an option of not checking my outlook mailbox without turning off the "display mail" feature entirely. And ofcourse i can see the weather/stock quotes only in the US of A.

At the end of the day, MS and Google can have their wars, but i think people will continue to use more useful applications like "Desktop Sidebar" that i've been using.

Weekend Alas!!

From complete joblessness to a maximum workload, the shift happened smoothly, silently and extremely swiftly, inflicting a killer blow on all my plans, time and everything else.

So Friday was indeed very welcome, with prospects of an AZAADI night at Inflation, an indian disc. But ofcourse it took quite a while before i realised that my plans had been changed. Some issues that cropped up in our testing kept us at work till 2 AM on Saturday.
Things were just as good on Saturday, with me ending up in a theatre in the evening watching "Mangal Pandey".

The movie by no stretch of imagination seemed like a product of 15 years of research and 2 years of production. Aamir khan's splendid acting albeit the movie had little or nothing to offer. It was good in patches, but definitely did not deliver as expected. I probably raised the bar a bit too high. AR Rehman has done a good job as usual, but the songs were mostly unnecessary in the context of the movie and definitely got their timing wrong. So all in all, yet another movie where the less said the better.

Things showed no signs of improvement on Sunday, with me spending a good portion of my time in the office.

On the bright side, we did manage to get ourselves tickets for the AR Rehman show in Rod Laver Arena in September.

Zopa

"Zopa is a term taken from business theory. It stands for Zone of Possible Agreement and is the overlap between one person’s bottom line (the lowest they’re prepared to get for something) and another person’s top line (the most they’re prepared to give for something). It’s the way people negotiate all sorts of stuff - buying a car, getting a mortgage - even a teenager negotiating with parents about staying out late. If there’s no Zopa, there’s no deal. " - Thats what the Site has to offer in terms of explaining the term Zopa.

Its an idea thats very much in tune with whats happening around us. Its a revolutionary concept which aims at making some of the most basic purposes served by banks redundant.

Here's what they say about themselves :

" Here's the way the world works (and it must be right because it's been like this for hundreds of years...)

People who have spare money give it to a bank. Banks then do whatever they like with it. Some of it they lend to people who need to borrow. Some of it they give to their shareholders. Some of it they gamble on the price of tin, or the dollar going down, or whether there'll be floods in Asia. Banks make lots of money from all this, a fraction of which they give back to their customers.

Zopa though lets people who have spare money to lend it directly to people, like them, who want to borrow it. No bank in the middle, no huge overheads, no unethical investments.

To minimise any risk, the money each lender puts in is spread amongst at least 50 borrowers (and likewise each borrower gets their money from a number of different lenders).

Zopa is, therefore, for people who want to be a part of something new. Who want to join a community of like-minded individuals and lend to them and borrow from them in a trusting but secure way.

Zopa is for people who are looking for a better rate of return. Zopa’s interest rates aren’t squeezed by middlemen (the banks) because there are no middlemen - that’s the Zopa idea.

Zopa is for creditworthy people who earn money in new ways, in ways that banks don’t always recognise. People who are self employed, people who have peaks and troughs to their income, people who would be invisible to a bank’s credit rating system but are seen and validated by Zopa’s."

iSkoot brings Skype to your cellphone

With Skype making its code available to other SPs to provide services over skype, the possibilities of services that can be delivered are many. This has pushed Skype onto a new frontier : Mobile phones.

With a $10 a year software rental charges, iSkoot is offering long distance calls to any Skype user for nothing more than the cost of local air time to dial up from your mobile to your broadband connected home computer.

The idea is similar to making a call through your company's conference bridge or VOIP line or a normal calling card. Just that you'll need to dial into your own computer rather than the conference bridge number or calling card number.

The iSkoot founder, Jacob Guedalia, said his vision was to ''enable the individual to become his own long-distance carrier" by routing calls over a home or office computer connection, instead of AT&T or Sprint.

More worries for telecom companies!!!

The Battle is On

Microsoft has not taken time to respond to Google's Hompage.

Click on the title of this blog or on the links section for the link to their "Start" page, which owes much of its look and feel to the Google homepage. Nothing whatsoever on the page to indicate its a Microsoft page though, but for the small MSN icon on the top corner of your browser window.

Technorati goes Mobile

David Stifry Technorati's CEO informs us in his blog that Technorati has been optimized for mobiles.

For those who can try it out : http://mobile.technorati.com

IPTV

The economist has an article on IPTV - a direction in which most traditional telecom players seem to be moving in.

With major cable firms enticing customers with a "Triple-play bundle" of TV, Broadband and telephony services, Mobile operators and thirdly VOIP providers.

IPTV is the last ditch effort from Telecom providers to stay in the race. There seem to be lots of legal and technical hurdles for now between them and IPTV.

But assuming they do provide users with the required bandwidth, will they be able to ensure that the user is not putting the available bandwidth to buy third party services from other providers.

"If you cant beat them, join them.", thats the strategy some others like the indian Telecom giant VSNL are adopting. VSNL plans to buy Teleglobe, the worlds largest VOIP Provider.

"Every big telecoms firm is investing to migrate from old, circuit-switched networks to new internet-based ones, with Britain's BT probably moving fastest."

With BT, Verizon, SBC all taking their first steps towards IPTV. We should hope to hear and see more of it very soon.

Terms to look out for: NGN, IMS ...