Idea Ads and e-paper

Recently Idea mobile came up with very good ad. Thats is one of the best ads i have seen, may be only for a techie like me.


But there companies like squareup who realized some  of these, they make use of mobile phones to pay bills by acting like a credit card reader, squareup is started by Twitter co-founder.
Actually he designed a small magnetic card reader which can plugged into audio port. This convert magnetic reader data into audio signals and send into the mobile for further processing.

There is another company mophie which also did something like this, good thing is that card reader seems like more robust.

If these technologies are used in the proper way we have avoid bills from restaurant, bus tickets etc which are valid only for short duration. Squareup provides a central repository to save the bills, which can be retrieved when we want.

When we enter a restaurant menu should be available in the mobile through some Wi-Fi gateway, once we select the items we can use credit card to make the payment.

startup like this

Starting a new company, standing on your own, a dream for dreamers. What you really want to start a new company, a great idea?, gifted programmers?, VC funding? and a marketing guru?.
Only the lucky ones will get all these things in one place.
Let us see what 37signals, a web2.0  product company is doing.

Jason is the Co-founder and President is of 37 signals. Jason implemented what he said in the video, so he and his co-workers published a book about their company, and the book is freely available on the web, you can read it here GettingReal. PDF is available here.

Fonts for Language Translations

According to Census of India of 2001, 29 languages are spoken by more than a million native speakers, 122 by more than 10,000, so I think this makes lots of sense to provide wwl support for Indian Languages. I was thinking of projects like Indian "Ayurveda Wiki" and "Indian Agriculture and its Market Wiki" for a long time, but most of the knowledge required for this kind of project is in the hands of our parent's generation, for them language is a problem. So in order to implement such a project we need to have translation engines (even though accuracy is a problem).

WWL seems a good solution, but in order to provide translations in multiple languages we need fonts for those languages. So what is a solution for this? FaaS yes it is a cloud solution Font as Service.

Fonts for the web page will be served from some cloud based font server, this is implemented in Firefox 3.5 onwards, read more on @font-face support in Firefox here. They also implemented Web Open Font Format(WOFF) see more here. There are multiple companies which Provide FasS service, see TypeKit and Fontdeck which is about to launch the service. Read more on FaaS here. But the problem with these FaaS service is lack of Fonts support for language translation, TypeKit and most of font foundries provide only English Fonts, yes I agree with reality that English fonts are the ones which is commonly used. But for the people who dream of a polyglot internet FaaS which provide Fonts for all the languages in the world is a necessity, and an integration with services like WWL is a dream comes true.

wwl and the polyglot internet

 Ethan Zuckerman's speech on The Future of Internet

The first wave of the Internet revolution changed expectations about the availability of information. Information that was stored in libraries, locked in government vaults or available only to subscribers was suddenly accessible to anyone with an internet connection. A second wave has changed expectations about who creates information online. Tens of millions of people are contributing content to the modern Internet, publishing photos, videos and blogposts to a global audience.
The globalization of the Internet has brought connectivity to almost 1.3 billion people. The Internet that results from globalization and user-authorship is profoundly polyglot. Wikipedia is now available in more than 210 languages, which implies that there are communities capable of authoring content in those tongues. Weblog search engine Technorati sees at least as many blogposts in Japanese as in English, and some scholars speculate that there may be as much Chinese content created on sites like Sina and QQ as on all English-language blogs combined. Read the complete story here.

Is something happening on the polyglot internet front? yes check out

TED Open Translation Project: This projects will translate TED talks in multiple languages as subtitles. The project launched with 300 translations in 40 languages, and 200 volunteer translators.
Global Voices Lingua Project :  Here volunteers will translate blog posts into many different languages.
Google Translate :  No Introduction required, it is from google.
Pootle: Something like Google Translate but open source
Yamli and Meedan : For Arabic translations.
dotSUB : Translated videos

But there is something else which interest me more, it is WWL or http://www.worldwidelexicon.org/ , it is providing a web API as in the cloud age so any web using this APIs can provide translations of its contents. Read on this The End Of The Language Barrier, this is a complete open source stuff, and find out all you want here.

If you are interested, read on Social Media Exchange, and A Web That Speaks Your Languae.

IIM CAT slipped down with a virus hit

The IIM CAT is in big trouble after a virus  hit, now they are planning to conduct paper based exam again for the aspirants.

When I was reading theses in the newspaper, I thought why IIM itself couldn't conduct these exams, or startup a company for this (they can hatch a lot in the incubator) and why they are going for US companies like Prometric, is it because it's website has all the tests in the world listed on it? I think startup will be a good option because India will conduct lots of test and Indians love to top those exams, and Indian criteria for success is marks. This is something bad from IIMs since their job is to startup new companies and create jobs for jobless millions, may be the heat inside the incubator is not proper.

Open source will come as a big help for these startups. checkout somethings like
Pareeksha : I doubt this as a Malayalam word, but the creators are Deutsch.
TCExam : I have no comments just check it out.
eXam : exam module for Plone CMS

We have some open source tools for course management in universities. Check out Moodle, Clarolin and Sakai. Will google chrome OS makes any sense in conducting Online exams? I think it is.

There are "Brave Hearts" out there who do cool things

I cannot stop posting this inspirational talk from Damien Katz, the creator of CouchDB, the thing behind Ubuntu One, Mozilla's Raindrop etc. This video is from RubyFringe Conference, find the video from InfoQ. Also have a look at his blog here.

Chrome Book: Are you ready for playing around?

Chrome OS source code is released to the public. You can get preview of Chrome Book here, see it boots up in 7 seconds.

You can find everything you needed regarding Chrome OS (Documentation and Videos) here and the source code here . Is it bug free? no i don't think so after seeing this list. How it achieves 7 seconds boot time? It needs solid state drive (It will not support booting from hard disk) and custom firmware, so on what all hardware Chrome OS will run? see the list Hey Hey see that page has a warning message "Warning: This page is for developers who both know how to build Chromium OS and aren't afraid to take a screwdriver to their computer." 

There are some important comments from Sundar Pichai, Google's VP of Product Management.

• You cannot download and install Chrome on any machine. You will have to buy a new one. we only support solid-state drives and certain types of WiFi cards.
• If you are a developer and have the right type of netbook (and a screwdriver) you can get Chrome OS running today.
• Google demoed Chrome OS on an Eee PC.
• In Chrome OS every application is a web application. There are no native applications. That gives us simplicity. It’s just a browser with a few modifications. And all data is Chrome OS is in the cloud. This is key, we want all of personal computing to work this way. If you lose your machine, you just get a new one, and it works.
• you could build it and run it in a virtual machine. That’s a great way to compile and debug.

Can you see the Chrome Book's (Eee PC) login window below, are u expecting it to work Desktop PC way?, no it will not work that way, you need a Google account (may be an OpenID), it uses "pam_google" module to Authenticate it. If you are out of Internet then you won't be able to login to the system, they are planning to add off line support using google gears.