Iphone coming to India

Apple announces IPhone3G release in next set of countries, which includes India. Yeah,  Airtel is bringing IPhone3G to India soon (August 22^nd ). Airtel has nearly 70 million subscribers. Seems like Airtel doesn’t have exclusive right to sell Iphone , which means there is other player who is also gonna come with Iphone. yes it is Vodafone. Vodafone hasn’t come up with any official news yet , but when i spoke to a Vodafone sales person he did agree that vodafone has plans to bring Iphone to India.

Ironically Airtel and Vodafone both doesn’t have 3G network up and running to support IPhone3G, so its probably going work on Edge and a lot of features related to GPS are still not going to work i guess. But Surely Iphone is going to bring thousands of other awesomeness.

Thank You Airtel ! Am finally going to use an unhacked Iphone in india after almost 10 months of hacked Iphone .

Gmail improves contact manager

Gmail rolls out a new features in Contacts manager. Click on contacts in gmail to see new features like Sugested Contacts/Most Contacted. Suggested Contacts – Gmail collects email addresses from sent and inbox to list email addresses of all that you have sent or recieved email from.If you have sent mail for more than five times to an email address Gmail automatically moves those contact to Most Contacted. This feature can be disabled as well by unchecking the checkbox in contacts page.

For more info on this please read Gmail blog.

Orkut a clear looser in front of Facebook

Facebook leads the pack in Social Networking, since its user count crossed Myspace couple of months back. More i use, more i am loving it. Facebook is still private and its valuation ranges from $6 billion -  $15 billion. Companies in queue to invest in them. I think Microsoft is the only big company that has invisted $250 Million in facebook. Seems like complete buyout of facebook could be unlikely.

Cool features in facebook – I love the suggestions that the facebook gives on friends you might know. Hundreds of third party apps integrated to facebook platform.
Not so cool – Search feature.

Orkut , owned by google, seems like a clear looser in front of facebook and myspace. except for India and Brazil it hardly has any users across the world. It sucks even more after its recent release of theme, making pages even more horrible.

Cool Feature -  tagging photos(facebook has it too).
Not so cool – user interface.

Technorati Tags     review,facebook

Ipod touch 2.0 is awesome

WOW !! Apple store is opened in india. Now you can get Ipod touch updates from apple store from india. Connect your ipod touch to your computer, and your itunes prompts for an update. You’ll have to choose your country and get the update for 10$ using any credit card. As an update you get Google Maps, Mail, Weather, Web Clips, Stocks, and Notes. with an addition you get a lot of userful free apps that you can download and sync to your ipod touch. There is an App Store icon that comes in with this update which will allow you to get third party apps from ipod touch directly, if you have a wifi.

Third party apps – out of the free thir party apps i love the Scribble – MS Paint like app, Dobot todos – to track todos. and few games like iMaze,iPint etc.

try ipod touch 2.0 and its cool apps and share your thoughts

Back to blogging…

hey friends,

Its been more than a year since i stopped blogging. Now i’ve decided to start blogging again. I’ll be writing on latest tech news. For people who dont know who i am, this is karthik i worked for zoho for couple of years then joined zimbra january 2007, which was later acquired by yahoo!.

More tips on google search

Search has made our life more easier and no wonder, Google has made the search more easier . But are we using google search up-to its potential ? I guess not. Here are few tips to help. Few may be obvious ones, and few others are really exciting .

1. Usual Search:

The way we usually search

Java Ajax Web Services

This is the same as this

Java| Ajax |Web | Services

or this

Java OR Ajax OR Web OR Services

2. Phrase search:
To make this search better we can use a search phrase

Java Ajax “Web Services”

Which searches for the phrase as a whole “Web Services”, Which makes sense.

3. Ignore Search :
Sometimes may be most of the search results may involve term “XML” in it, which you would like to ignore.Then we can use

Java Ajax “Web Services” - XML

4. Site Search :
You can google to search from particularly one or more sites, for eg.

Java Ajax “Web Services” site:www.sun.com

Which will list results only from site sun.com .

By the same way u can igonre search result from one or more sites for eg.

Java Ajax “Web Services” -site:www.sun.com -site:www.theserverside.com

Which will list all results except from these two sites.

5.Defenition Search
You can google to search for defenition of particular word, for eg.

define:enthusiasm

So, U dont need to go for a dictionary.

6.Cached Pages Search :
You can google to search pages that are no longer available on web, for eg.

cache:www.sun.com

isn’t it interesting.
7. Calculator :
Yeah believe me, you can use your google search to calculate.Type in and click search for eg.

(2000*4.6)/12.2

will give you 754.098361.

8. Currency conversion :
you can use currency conversion like

4 USD in INR

May give you equivalent of 4 US Dollar in indian rupees. You can search even more simpler, for eg.

5 British pounds in Indian money

9. Link search :
This may help you, if you have a site and need to know who else in the world has a link to your site.

link:mysite.com

10. Filetype Search
You may google to search for pdf documents about JAVA, for eg.

Java filetype:pdf

Similarly you can use filetype:doc , filetype:ppt

if you can help me with few other search tips, Pease drop it in comments.

Soaring spam levels — what’s the reason ?

I’ve been experiencing a spike in the incoming spam levels for the past couple of months.That is what led me to “google” for the spam reasons, and got some interesting news to share with. Soaring Spam levels was not only for me but for the whole world since October this year , reports say.

There is one main reason for new attack over the corporate inbox, Image Spam. Image spam is unwanted e-mail in which text is embedded in an image to bypass traditional Spam filters that catch spam by scanning messages for key words and by using other text-based techniques.

According to Secure Computing, anti-spam vendors has also developed signatures designed to detect specific image spam messages. In doing so, the anti-spam software was able to reference these signatures and reject identical or nearly identical messages. However, spammers have now fired a new barrage of image spam using randomized images that appear identical to the human eye, yet appear to be entirely unique to most anti-spam software.

We’ll hope for a better anti-spam which is going to save us from these spam attacks which occupies almost half of our inboxes.

Google is likely to aquire youtube

Couple of days back Michael Arrington of Techcrunch reported that Google is likely to acquire youtube, the best video sharing site so far. Now Wall St.Journal has also cofirmed about the Google and YouTube acquisition talks.If you wonder why is google planning to acquire YouTube when it has a videos sharing site(Google video) on its own? interesting traffic stats and discussion posted by hitwise can answer your questions partly, the rest is wierd. Looking back to google’s acquisition path it has acquired a lot of startups, of which am listing a few..

• Pyra Labs, a weblogging provider and owner of Blogger was acquired.
• picasa(Photo storage) was acquired.
• Kaltix, a small start-up, was acquired to develop and launch Personalized Search.
• Keyhole was acquired for Google Earth
• 2Web Technologies was acquired for google spreadsheet.
• Urchin Software Corporation was acquired to develop and launch Google Analytics.
• writely , a product of Upstartle , a silicon valley startup was acquired for google writely(Online Word Processor).

If at all this acquisition happens, my feeling is that google has wasted its money instead it could have improved its products including google videos. Though google has been releasing product after product, truth is that lot of thier products haven’t faced any recent update and most of them are yet to go out of beta.

Internet Explorer vs Firefox

Microsoft has released first public release candidate, IE7 RC1, for Windows XP, last month.On other hand Firefox has also released firefox2.0 beta 2 developer preview for testing purpose heating up the Competition in browser space.
Being a big fan of Firefox, release of IE7 RC1 wasn’t an exciting news for me, but still i had to download it to test my product.It was simply good.IE performance has increased considerably as they claim.Sites with heavy javascript has always been a problem for me in IE6.With the release candidate RC1 of their new browser version IE7, it seems that they have finally fixed this issue. You can test it yourself in this test case, which has been available in qooxdoo for several months to analyze and measure the IE performance problems. Please look at status bar of your browser. It will display the execution time of each loop while a large number of objects exists.

Everything was working fine for me until i decided to uninstal IE7, now it behaved in its usual way leaving few bugs in my IE6.That’s really frustrating.

The latest figure release by onestat shows that Firefox browser continue to gain market share over leader IE. Firefox now has a total global usage share of 12.93 percent, while Internet Explorer commands a lion share of 83.05 percent. I am a big supporter of Firefox, and except for thier memory leakage problem, I would say Firefox is a better browser compare to IE in term of usability, security and most of all stability.

Not to forget, Opera and Safari are too reacting with new releases which are worth considering.Kindly let me know whats your stand on this next generation browser war.

What is AJAX?

Ajax, shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes.Entire page need not be reloaded every time a request is sent.

Ajax is not a technology in itself, it is a group of technology

• The Ajax technique uses XMLHttpRequest (Javascript) object to exchange data with the web server.
• Any format including XML , JSON and sometimes even plain text are used for transferring data between the server and client. These files may be created dynamically by some form of server-side scripting (Java / PHP).
• Dom allows to access and update the content, structure and style of documents using Javascript.
• XHTML (or HTML) , CSS and helps in marking up and styling information.

As like any other technique, AJAX too has pros and cons.Am listing a couple of them here.

Pros :

• One great advantage that anyone will never deny is the speed and the resposiveness.
• As the Ajax requests are Asynchronous, user can send simultaneous requests and still get response for all his requests.

Cons :

• Users generally expect that clicking the back button in web applications will move their browser to the last page it loaded, and in Ajax that not might be the case. Though there are various technical solution to this problem using hidden IFRAMEs, I would suggest the best solution is a proper design which doesn’t tempt the user to click “Back button”.
• Difficulty of the user to bookmark a particular state of the application, due to the dynamic update of the content.
• As a developer, annoying fact is the browser differences.Browser differences sucks.

While building next generation Web Application (Web 2.0), I believe rather than doing some workarounds for these disadvantages, it is better to leave them as such and concentrate more on the design.