Monthly Archive for November, 2005

Stuff Catching My Interest

There is a lot of interesting stuff happening with respect to technology and innovations online. I have listed down some of the new launches that sound both innovative and promising. I am following the progress of these right now.

Gritwire presents an easy way to customize real-time text and multimedia ‘SpeedFeeds’ by providing updates on the things you want to see and hear. It does so by leveraging the latest in internet content syndication technologies (RSS, OPML) and the explosive power of social networking (such as Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook). The site acts as a central place for aggregating and customizing the content according to your needs, and then have it delivered to your desktop through a Gritwire Deskbar. The site itself has a very neat and ajax-based interface.

Gollum is a demonstration of what all can be done with AJAX. Gollum is an open-source, web app built in AJAX that minimizes Wikipedia to the simplest interface: a toolbar, a search bar, and the article. The presentation of the articles is also enhanced, with bigger headings and shifting the category list to the top of the page. Features include a bookmarking facility, ability to send e-mail links of the article as recommendations, and the Print button. However, I agree with other users about the lack of tabs as a big drawback for this interface.

Songbird is the latest innovation from the developers of Winamp and Yahoo Music Engine. According to the site, ‘Songbird is built atop the Mozilla Foundation’s XULRunner platform also used by the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client and other desktop applications. Songbird runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux personal computers with few OS-specific tweakages.’ The project is still in alpha, and looks like a promising digital media player. Songbird Public Preview v0.1 codename Hilda, will be released mid-December 2005.

Previewseek

I loved this search engine. Previewseek calls itself “the world’s most advanced search engine”. The search engine uses one of the most popular technologies online on the Internet today - AJAX.

Besides the usual results, the search engine also displays a list of words related to the search query and you can refine your search using them; thumbnails of web pages also appear alongside results. I found the depth of search results to be marginally less than Google, but the launch is just beta now. You never know when it will catch up with Google. However, it is very interesting to see a company with guts coming up against the giants like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in the search arena. The competition just got hotter :-).

Corporate Resistance

Sustainable competitive advantages are back as the key paradigms of business growth and success. After exhausting the best practices guidelines preached by diverse groups of management thinkers, the tide is turning back to “smart-enable” the most talented workers in an organization for more productivity and efficiency.

For the last few decades, organizations have undertaken various approaches to boost their internal targets and productivity matrix parameters. From internal restructuring to process outsourcing, automation initiatives to reengineering, each process has been minutely studied and refined. All this amalgamation of ideas and best practices has brought about a level of saturation for an organization to further its process and business related initiatives. So the thought-process is shifting back to the old paradigms of empowering its employees with real-time information and introducing new knowledge-sharing platforms resulting in better informed employees.

I shall be writing on the various innovations and improvements that are being discussed and studied on this front in my next post. But cultural issues still remain one of the biggest enemies of transitioning to any new style of working. Even though corporations try to bring about a paradigm shift in the ways employees interact with one another and across the organization, there is a huge cultural gap that needs to be covered. The traditional ways of running processes and transactions have created a habitual mindset amongst employees, so much so that adherence to any new methodology usually results in a lot of negative feedback. Introduction of these new ideas undeniably faces a lot of resistance from the employees. What is desired is a leap to a new cultural mindset, which is ready to embrace new ideas and try out new ways of doing things. The culture shift, an inherent ingredient of such introductions, is rightly captured by Lou Gerstner’s statement in Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance – “I came to see in my time at IBM that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game—it is the game.”

Ideas

Over a period of next few weeks, I will be posting my thoughts on business, the inherent processes and new innovative technologies that are changing the rules of the game. There is a lot that I have been thinking about lately, and it has only been fuelled by the discussions taking place in the blogosphere. All this has led to a confluence of thoughts and ideas, which I feel should be shared across with others and get feedback on the thought process.

Some of the things that I would be looking at include Competitive Intelligence in today’s information free environment, the corporate blogging boom, the changing paradigms of data analytics, and newer technology implications for healthcare and insurance.

Google Analytics

I have added Google Analytics to my blog site. It takes nearly 12 hours before you can see data related to your site. I am waiting for the reports for my blog to come out, and will be posting them here soon.

Google Analytics is a free page tag-based measurement service based on Google’s Urchin acquisition in March of this year. The service is offering unlimited page views to AdWords customers and a cap of 5 million page views monthly for everyone else.

Happy Birthday Amit

Enjoy your special day :-). Wishing you many happy returns of the day. Click here for your birthday gift.

Happy Diwali

Rangoli at Netscribes on Diwali Eve

The festival of lights has arrived. Here is wishing everyone a happy diwali and a lifetime of happiness and joy. The festival of lights always brings new hope and brightness in the banal lives of people. I am sure this diwali will also bring the same euphoria and feeling of well being. The picture was taken with my camera phone, Nokia 6680, at the entrance of the Netscribes office on Diwali eve.