Tablet PC

The tablet PC is smaller than the notebook PC and mostly used by people who have to make a lot of notes. Using a digital pen and hand writing recognition software you can directly write on to the screen and it can be converted into a text file. Many tablet PC's also have speech recognition built into it. But for the handwriting and speech recognition to work properly the software has to be trained to recognise the nuances of speech or handwriting of a particular person.HP sells a tablet for Rs 90,000, Toshiba for 1,55,000 and Panasonic for 2,30,000.

YouTube soon to Pay Content Providers

Great news for all us bloggers, YOuTube is soon going to pay its customers who contribute content. Chad Huley co-founder of youtube has said recently. The modalities of the proposal and the payment quantity, model and terms are yet to be finalised and diclosed. But the said step has been taken up to foster creativity and give a boost to the already thriving market of User Created Content. Earlier Google acquired YouTube for a Humonguos 1.65 Billion dollars.So, After winning at IBibo, buy a mobile with camera or Handycam and start shooting and sharing. There may soon be a Oscar Award for best User Created Content.Bravo.

IPTV : Technology of the Future

According to bill gates convergence is soon going to overwhelm the TV programming segment with Broadcast TV facing tough competition from IPTV. Internet is soon going to dictate how users view TV. The convergence of Computer and TV indicates this trend. Also User Generated Content is fast picking up traction in the country. Looks like Bill may be right. But not discounting the fact that their may be a totally disruptive technology like a VR walkman. Wear and experince movies..
Well the way technology is developing, nothing can be expected to remain static for more
than a decade.

Technology as A Democratisation Force

Imagine if there was no VOIP you had to pay artificailly high tariffs. Due to VOIP long distance telephony rates dropped heavily in the last decade and half. Also blogging has caused the Media to be more responsible in including the public opinion. Nothing escapes the vision of bloggers. There are 200 million bloggers worldwide, Indiatimes has 20,000 and India has 1.2 million blogs.Fortune rated bloggers as the Person of the Year 2006.That is a Kudo for you.

Address Change

This blog is temporarily shifted to

http://blogs.ibibo.com/TechnicalJournal

due to better management capabilities.

Ps. Bear.
Rajeev.

Evolution of Personal Broadcasting

Personal broadcasting started with the plain vanilla text only blogs. These blogs were used either as a tool for personnel expression or for the express purpose of some commercial gain as in the case of CRM, Corporate blogs, Branding and Product Promotion.

Then came audio podcasts. Also photo blogging took off. Now with the avilability of cheap video and audio recording converged devices people have takem to Video Blogging or VLogging or Vodcasting as it is commonly called. This is also the age of User Created Content.

Podcasting and Vodcasting is also being used by various universities to deliver educational material to the student community through sites like i-tunes as the students already have the devices namely I-Pods to access these casts.

Well, the digital future is here, but for the divide.

Cisco's Lawsuit

Cisco already has 5 I-Phones based on VOIP technology and recently it has added another couple to its stable. It has also filed a lawsuit against Apple for infringement of its patent for I-Phone. Previously Apple was in talks with Cisco for a settlement but as the talks did'nt materilise positively and the launc date neared they went ahead.

Now I think mature companies should not think scarcity mindset and think win-win just like winners and carve out amicable solutions which are acceptable to all the parties. After all co-opetition is better than competition and shows more social intelligence.

What is your opinion?

Technology Trends

The various technologies which are likely to pick up in 2007 includes the following. RFID tags will be adopted more widely by the retial sector for inventory mangement and SCM. Biometrics for identification. In that face recognition and fingerprinting are standing to gain. AJAX will be used to develop better web applications and interfaces. WiMax wireless technology would be adopted more widely.

Also IPTV , Mobile TV, and VAS mobile services would gain traction. WEb 2.0 applications like sociql networking sites, user created content like YOu Tube and Personal Broadcasting will see new heights and a revenue generation model. SOA will be adopted widely. AI applications are increasing in scope. Also proactive security applications would be adopted widely instead of the reactive security model.

Steps would be taken to develop complex robotics model which are more sophisticated and functional. Nano technology will see more practical application in It and other related vistas.

Top IT spend would be in the fiel dof Security,OS,BI,CRM,ERP and SaaS.

Are we ready?

The Vista Juggernaut

The al lnew Vista OS has been delayed by more than a year and a half. WEll it has some cool features like new enhanced 3d user interface. It has advanced security, better search and networking capabilities.

The minimum requirements are

1. 800 MHz clock speed
2. 512 MB RAM
3. Direct x 9.0 compatible Graphics processor.

The more sophisticated the hardware the better performence can b eexpected.

It seems that some products like I-pod and the MAC computers for Apple are blockbusters and change the fortunes of a Company. Similarly there are OS's which change the dynamics of economics of a number of nations. Vista is one among them which is supposed to alter the economics of a number of countries and also has a complete eco-system around it. Hardware, software, jobs et al. The scenario is set to change the dynamics of IT market.

Vista supports the 64 bit computing. AMD already supports it and intel processors including dual core are based on 64 bit computing.

MIcrosoft has target of shipping 100 million Vista copies in the first year 30% of them to the European companies. For every Euro it generates for Microsoft European countries are set to gain 40 Euros.

The entire eco system around Vista is anywhere in excess of $40 billion. Recently microsoft had announced that it is stopping the 10 year support for OS's for the Windows 98 version. Happy upgrading.

Room render by SGI

A home to be afforded by the super rich or a spy of the cadre of James Bond. SGI a Japanese firm has come up with a Room Render technology which controls all electronic apliances and digital devices by voice commands. It also controls the ambience of the room through lighting control and playing appropriate soothing music and also releasing suitable aromas.

So the system recognises the emotions in the voice and appropriately creates a suitable ambience. If you are tired after work, it may play soothing music and dim the lights. If you are in a rocking mood it may play you some cool music hits and bright light. What ever is going to happen to the manual controls and remote controls is a no-brainer.

I-Phone Launched by Apple

Apple has unveiled the iPhone, the much hyped and awaited 3 in 1. It has the functionality of IM,Camera ( 2 Megapixel), I-Pod, Phone all combined into one. It has a slick appearance and doesn't sport a keypad. There is a sophisticated touchscreen which is used to type in phone numbers or select songs or videos to be played. Apple has also tied up with Yahoo to provide the MAP and E-Mail services on its I-Phone. All in all a desirable convergance or MFD.

Adaptive Supercomputers

GEnerally speaking supercomputers are designed for a particular domain or specific application only , say for weather forecasting or miniral exploration or astrophysics. Supercomputing is employed where a multitude of calculations are involved which needs to be completed in a specified period of time.

Recently DARPA financed CRAY $250 million for research in adaptive supercomputing project. So what is this adaptive supercomputing? Adaptive supercomputing involves setting up of multi-functional or general purpose computing in a HPC ( High Performance Supercomputing ) environment. The computing platform consists of different kinds of microprocessors like general purpose chip and others like multithreaded, FPGA, vector processor et al. There is software platform which makes the task of choosing a particular or group of processors based on the specific requirements giving the application developer a level of abstraction to work on.

Other players in the field of HPC are IBM,HP,SGI etc. So CRAY is a pioneer in adaptive technology.

Artificial Intelligence

Not long back people used to scorn at the pace at which AI systems were developing but no longer. REcent advances in artificial intelligence is keeping stride with the expectations of the users.

An artificial intelligence system is one which is composed of parallel microprocessing systems which try to mimic human thinking. Although the simulation of human neral systems is nowhere near the capability ofthe real human brain but it is nearing that stage. Right now a newtwork of processors can be trained using real time data or bayesian inference in the absence of data to study the patterns in the data and draw meaningful information and learning from the system.

AI among other applications are also finding applications in the Enterprise Application space namely, BI, Data Mining, SCM and CRM. More on this in future posts.

Spintronics

Spintronics is the science of Electron spin and its manipulation for productive purposes. Spintronics is already at work in the hard disks of your I-Pod, Notepad , and other hand held devices. They give huge storage capacity to the hard disk.

How does it work. See traditionally chips handled digital storage by storing a charge or not in a semiconductor. o/1 mechanism. After 50 years of stagnancy there is a shift in the technology. What is that shift . Let me explain. Now the spin of electron is being used to store information. THis has applications in Hard Disk, MRAM and Microprocessors.

The advantage of using spintronics is that the polarised electron retians its stage for a much longer time compared to a charge and hense results in a reduction in power consumption requirement. Also if used in RAM ( MRAM) it results in non volatile memory and hense instant boot. MRAM would soon be available. Also soon microchips would be available which would run 100 times faster in even smaller chips.

Shape Changing Robots

There are robots which can change shape. Polymorphic can we call them. NASA has developed them for space exploration and for the traversal of hazardous areas on Earth.

It is composed of a tetrahedral structure. Combining cores with struts. The struts expand and contract and the shapes taken are cube, sphere, flat etc. So it can adapt to the terrain and explore surface of planets. It has embedded processors which control the shape and movement of struts by analyzing the surrounding using sensors.

So robots playing orchestra, robots playing bartender, caring for elders, what next?

Feature Clutter

A mobile phone which doubles up as music player, photo viewer, view videos, TV, Chat, Browse the net and E-Mail. Obviously too many a feature packed into a single gadget. It is common knowledge that when more fetures are added to a single device, soon it gets feature cluttered. The performence can also degrade and bugs can inadvertantly creep into the design. So is it wise to infinitely add new features to a given gadget or will it be wise to stop after a certain point.

Well there are two camps. One wants more and more features in a single device. I think the new generation belongs to this category. Tech-savvy and total geeks, they want more out of every think in life. Also some others say there should be a bare bone product with optional add-ons . After all why should a customer be made to pay for certain features which he or she may never use. There are people who differ even with these people saying that upgrading is a head-ache.

Well the Big Fight continues.

Quality, Technology, Fashion and Obsolescence

Obsolescence was a big problem of yesteryears shortage economy. But obsolete products were profitably sold.Thats a paradox. In fact obsolescence is even a problem today. But then has anyone ever given a thought to the relationship between all these parameters.

1. With increasing Fashion, Products can be created which are more crappy as consumer is likely to replace the products in a month-6 months depending on which class he/she belongs to.

2. Changing technology results in increasing obsolescence.

3. Changing fashion results in increasing obsolescence.

Obsolescence in globalisation is a more pervasive and ubiquitous phenomenon.To manage obsolescence one needs to invest in R&D and develop new products by prognosing customer needs and emerging trends.More proactive companies create market segments,the lesser ones cater to existing markets.Be a trailblazer.