In these times of aggressive marketing, and marginally improving customer service to back it up, Hewlett-Packard has come as a pleasant surprise. I had recently bought the awesome HP dv1345 laptop from a vendor in India. During the course of installing some new software, I found that my bluetooth was not running. And the DVD writer was not working directly from Windows XP.
After doing some deep searches on Google, and accessing various online discussion forums, I thought that the best way to address this would be to have someone from HP take a look at it. But due to time constraints, I thought of trying the online help desk of HP. And I was flabbergasted. The service is not only fast, but an extremely pleasant experience in itself. I came to know about the software driver upgrade for Bluetooth. And the DVD writer was not a hardware problem, but a Windows error. I tested the DVD writer with Nero and it is rocking. The HP help desk was quick to respond and the chat applet was nicely designed. I found the people informative, and I was able to resolve both the problems quickly with their help.
It is nice to see that HP is not only focused on innovation, and marketing of its new products - but at the same time has the right kind of customer service to back it up. The help desk people are always ready to help you out with eagerness and enthusiasm. These positive experiences make me feel that going along with HP, even though there were IBM, Sony, and Toshiba around - was a good decision.
Just got a beta invite from Mabber for their new mobile chat application, which is built on the jabber framework. A very neat application which works both on the web as well as on a mobile phone.
Here is a screenshot of the application in the beta stage:
On accessing the website and logging in, the site launches an Instant Messenger window that provides access to the following gateways - Yahoo, Hotmail, ICQ and AIM. The interface is good with the ability to categorize users and IM functionality is also fast. You would see another excellent use of AJAX in this application. I think AJAX is to Web 2.0 what Javascript/Flash was to Web 1.0.
The new technology is going to reduce the sms messaging charges for sure, but at the same time the rising GPRS access charges from mobile companies would be a bother for this new application. The USP of this service is to provide a means to chat with others through this app with the assumption that data transfer (read GPRS on a GSM network) will always be priced lower than the price of a single sms. So one can chat for long without spending too much money. However, for a place like Mumbai where Hutch charges 10p per 10kb download, long chats could be an issue.
Another thing to be noted is that the application does not work if you have a basic GPRS subscription. You would need the advanced GPRS connection (priced at INR 499 by Hutch Mumbai) to use this app. Further, the popularity of GPRS and Internet access through mobile phones is a trend still in its infancy in India. So these kind of applications might take some time to pick steam in India. However, on a positive note, technologies like these are redefining the mobile communications space and as the innovation persists, this would also put a lot of pressure on the mobile service providers to think of new ways to gain revenue. And as for those who have web access through their mobile devices, this should prove to be a better means to communicate compared to sending sms.
There is not much visibility on the business model but the company might go for subscription-based models in future. The token that I received for mobile access is valid till 1 March 2006. Operating in an emerging space, here is wishing Mabber the very best.
Thanks to TechCrunch for providing the invite. You can check out the review of Mabber there.
1. Move the Tabs - Move the tab bar to the bottom of the firefox window or on the left or right. Very useful feature, in case you do not want to keep moving your mouse to the top of the browser window for changing tabs. The code can be found here.
2. Session Saver - A must-have tool for people who see frequent browser crashes or OS reboots. SessionSaver restores your browser on restart with windows, tabs, and even things you were typing-exactly- as you left it. This is a very handy tool as it is immune to OS or browser crashes. It simply restores everything as it was when the shutdown/crash happened.
3. Del.icio.us - This is a new extension for Firefox. Now I can save all my bookmarks directly from my browser window, without leaving the page at all. Bookmarking with Del.icio.us is a piece of cake now. The buttons can be placed anywhere on the browser menu and you can access and post your bookmarks with a single click. When posting, a pop-up window opens up thus obviating any need to leave the page. A neat feature.
4. Super DragAndGo - One of my favourite extensions. Simply drag a link or anything like a uri (e.g. “gagankaul.com” ), and throw it to anywhere blank on the webpage to open the it in a new tab. No more pressing the control button to open links or pages in a new tab, and no right clicking either. Simply drag the link and drop it. A very neat extension.
5. Web Developer - Absolutely a MUST for web developers. The extension provides quick links to all the standard developer tools, the most outstanding being the ability to edit CSS.
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.
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 :-).
Businessworld has an interesting write-up on India and China IT initiatives. It writes that India is more software centric and China has hardware competence. However, chip design, that is a major component of hardware is something where Taiwan takes an edge over China. Keeping this in limelight, Businessword outlines the strategy that China is pursuing to become a major competitor in the IT industry, which encompasses both hardware and software. However, as the Indian IT companies still strive to look for a niche model, the existing China operations of India companies do not have a work force greater than 200. Major reasons cited are the inability to win major contracts because of a non-transparent bidding process.
However, software companies like TCS are pioneering a new business model where in Indian and Chinese technology firms are combining their skills and jointly penetrating the global IT market. This would result in the Indian software firms gaining excess to the ‘closed-till-now’ China market, and at the same time create an opportunity for the China firms to develop economies of scale in software; a move that can take care of the competition threat by forming joint ventures, and at the same time develop a culture of world-class IT firms in Asia. This is a very interesting article for cracking the market that seemed impenetrable uptil now.
Here comes the first post from my new laptop HP dv1345 (from HP dv1000 series). It is a small little workhorse and I am getting excited about it as the days pass. (Pictures taken with Nokia 6680 camera phone).
Got it on 3rd October, and it brought a good omen with it. I won the Intel Kismat ki Chaabi contest on the very next day. So now I would be treating myself to a new bike soon, thanks to the Intel promo that is going on India right now. It was a tough decision to make, as the grand prize is a cool gift voucher for INR 1 lac for the five options, viz. an International Tour courtesy Thomas Cook, Dubai Shopping Festival, Child Education Plan, Samsung Digital Home Range, and Bajaj Motorcycles. I opted for the motorcycle option, as I can buy two bikes for around 1.20 lacs, one for myself (yours truly desperately needs one as commuting is starting to become an expensive and painful proposition in autorickshaws). So would need to shell out 20k more and gift my younger brother a bike as well. Not a bad deal at all. I am on a new high ;-).
Coming back to Adam (yeah, that is what I am planning to name my laptop - name brings many connotations along with this being my first laptop), it has the following specs:
- Intel Centrino 1.73 GHz
- 60 Gb HDD
- 512 RAM single module
- DVD/CD +/- RW
- Wifi 802.11 b/g
- 14.1″ Wide Screen
- Quick Play Functionality - a cool feature that lets you play music and watch DVDs without booting the laptop
- Beautiful blue-lit keyboard
- 3 USB Ports, 1 Firewire, 1 Card Reader (SD, MMC, XD, SM), 1 Network Card Adapter
- HP Remote - Loved this. Can use this while watching movies, and can also do a windows shut down using the remote
- Windows XP Home Edition
Here is a picture of the Brightview Screen:
It weighs a decent 2.3 kgs and is not very heavy to carry. I will be writing a review on this soon. For now, I am hooked :-).
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