While the debate around book search rages on in the U.S. tech community and around the world, witness the power and efficiency of book search in New Delhi, India at Teksons Book Store (GK-1 M-Block market):
1. I execute a query for ‘Lord Ganesha’s Feast of Laughter’ with a store manager
2. The store manager dispatches two resources to search for the book (see photograph below)
3. The book is delivered to me with a response time of 5.342 seconds
Copy of the mail I just sent to the barcampdelhi Yahoo group:
> Hey folks,
>
> I’m organizing a geek dinner (with help from Gaurav @ Tekriti) on
> Monday, March 13th. At Gaurav’s suggestion, we’re going to meet at
> the DLF Mega Mall food court in Gurgaon at 8:30pm. Please RSVP on
> e-mail (rakesh at snapstream dot com) or by phone (9810497266). Please pass
> the word along to other geek friends, even if they weren’t able to
> make it to barcamp. It’ll be a good chance to connect again after
> barcamp this past weekend.
>
> Hope to see a lot of you there!
I spent all of Saturday this past weekend at BarCamp Delhi (a nice coincidence that it was scheduled while I am here in India for a wedding!)
My summary of Barcamp Delhi:
* I love Delhi (lived here for five years during middle school and high school) and while I’ve spent a lot of time here, I’ve never been around the kind of smart, motivated and talented technologists that I spent time with on Saturday. I expect great things from these people!
* Meeting the folks that I did really hit home what a small technology world we live in and how much smaller it is thanks to blogs. It was a bit surreal (Scoble has described the same sentiment before) to be sitting in Adobe’s office in NOIDA and hearing folks in the audience dissect and discuss technologies like Google News, gada.be, Windows Live and Gmail.
* Adobe’s office in Delhi is really nice — a big thanks to them for giving us their conference rooms, for feeding us lunch, and last, but certainly not least, for the fast and free wi-fi. And while I’m at it, big thanks also goes to the folks that catalyzed and planned the event: Gaurav, Jonathan Boutelle, Manik Juneja, and Amit Ranjan.
* Manish talked about microformats as a solution for knowledge management in organizations and in this context, he had a screenshot of a microformats plug-in for wordpress. I’ve read about microformats and understand what they are all about, but seeing it integrated into a blog publishing platform wasn’t something I had seen before and it was very cool. Manish’s is a great speaker, but I felt the content was a bit jargony and maybe too academic in places — I could tell from the Q&A that Manish gets this stuff so my only criticism here is that IMO he should have communicated it in clearer simpler language. Anyways, I’m still not sure about how structured user-generated content is going to come into existence, but microformats deployed through blog publishing platforms seem like one viable approach. There are other approaches like Edgeio and Google Base.
* Want to befriend an Indian engineer / technologist? Buy him a beer. In particular, buy him a Foster’s. 🙂
* Gaurav (one of the barcamp organizers) had a great presentation on bootstrapping a company — it was succinct, to the point and engaging. There were a lot of things in his presentation that I’ve learned myself through personal experience or from others, but I particularly enjoyed how everything was contextualized to India.
* Abhishek Agrawal had a presentation entitled “Why startup?” that preceded Gaurav’s. I missed most of the presentation but caught the tail-end of it and I could tell it that it was a good session. Abhishek carpooled with me to and from barcamp and he struck me as a well-informed, analytical and motivated technologist. I look forward to following what he does with his new company.
* Some of the presenters were talented speakers — VeerChand Bothra and Anuj Khurana were two guys that I’ll single out.
* There were no female presenters, though there were several women in attendance.
* Sorry I couldn’t join everyone for drinks later, but I plan to organize a geek dinner in the next week or so before I head back to the States. If you were interested in joining, drop me a line at rakesh at agrawal dot org.
Barcamp Delhi was great and I hope to see this technology community in Delhi really grow and flourish over time!
Just finished up the day at Barcamp Delhi and it was great. More on the conference later, for now check out the photographs that I took (or check out all flickr images tagged with ‘barcampdelhi’)
As I’ve mentioned earlier I’ve recently begun to use a Windows Mobile 5.0 phone, the Cingular 2125 aka the HTC Faraday.
The phone’s EDGE/GPRS connection has proven to be very useful here in Delhi where one can end up spending a lot of time in the car driving from one part of the city to another (though the traffic gets better every year as the infrastructure improves). So I’ve been using an Airtel SIM chip with an unlimited GPRS subscription and one incredibly cool and useful service that I’ve been using on this trip to India is Shozu.
Here’s the usage scenario for Shozu:
1) snap a photograph with your phone’s camera
2) tell Shozu whether you want to upload the photograph to flickr
3) if you answer yes, it automatically uploads it to flickr
(And if you want, you can configure it so Shozu skips step #2 so every photograph you take automatically gets uploaded… not a feature you’d want to turn on if you were, say, Paris Hilton.)
I used this feature all night at the wedding last night so my parents, who are sorely missing Ananya back in the States, could see near real-time photographs of her:
Shozu installed pretty easily on my 2125 and linking my Shozu and flickr account into the Shozu software on my phone was pretty easy too. I particularly like the way Shozu seamlessly integrates in with the camera software on my Windows Mobile phone. Immediately after I snap a photograph, the Shozu screen seamlessly pops up to ask me if the photo I just took is something I want to upload. The uploading is also seamless and in-the-background and I could easily check to see whether images I had chosen to “Shozu” had actually been uploaded or not.
The only downside is that the camera on my 2125 (like most phone cameras) isn’t that great. Actually, it’s pretty terrible for anything other than, well, photos where I don’t care about image quality. So, what I really want is to have this built into my digital SLR (like Jason Calacanis put on his Christmas wishlist). Nonetheless, I see myself continuing to use Shozu a lot and it’s a great pointer to the future of Internet connected consumer electronics devices.
The other thought I have is this: considering that early reviews of Wi-fi digital cameras haven’t been that hot, the people designing these products would do well to carefully study the Shozu experience.
I had to download some large files (1gb in size!) and my home broadband connection just wasn’t cutting it. So in search of a faster internet connection, I ended up at the Reliance WebWorld internet center / cafe in New Friends Colony. The experience was terrible — someone at Reliance, hire some real programmers! The sign-up process was four steps but each step took about 5-7 minutes of processing. I asked one of the attendants why this was the case and he gave be the bizarre explanation of “Well, it has to check your desired user ID against the entire national database of Reliance WebWorld user IDs.” Huh? And then, once I was logged in, it was this very crippled kiosk shell on top of Windows with the filesystem locked down. I was eventually able to get around the filesystem being locked down and when I did, to my disappointment I was only able to get download speeds of about 8-9KB/s. 🙁
I love the Reliance WebWorld concept and the fact that they are all over the place here in Delhi. These shops will prove to be very valuable to Reliance as it sells more and more consumer services. But they have a lot of work to do on the user experience.
Man, it’s a crazy world… I’ll be in Delhi (India) next week for a wedding in the family so I decided I’d try to connect with some technologists over there, maybe organize a geek dinner or something. What do you know, next Saturday they’re hosting a barcamp in Delhi! And of all people, Scoble will be there! Wacky. Last time I saw met him was at Gnomedex in the beautiful downtown library in Seattle. Anyways, I’m looking forward to connecting with technology folks in Delhi!
UPDATE: Oops, my mistake, as Gaurav was nice enough to point out, Scoble’s not going to be there.
why don’t we enable the storage of the next and previous photograph(s) in the digital file for an image. yeah, sure, it would take up a lot of storage space, but it’s often really cool to see other photographs that were taken before and after an image. case in point: I don’t know about others, but for me there are certain “famous” photographs, indelible images that have gone from being images that capture a moment to being, well, famous. take an image that’s iconic like that for you and try to find the photograph taken before and after that photograph — the result for me was kind of like a behind-the-scenes of the original photograph. that would be the idea behind this, build in a behind the scenes into every photograph.
this may be more relevant to prosumer cameras (like my canon digital rebel) where multiple photos can easily be taken in succession. and then, what if the before and after photographs were crappy images or simply duplicate frames?
The old phone
Until recently, I was Nokia 6610 user. What a great cell phone. I used this phone with T-mobile service and it made me a big, big fan of Nokia phones. The hardware was very robust (my phone took quite a beating over its long life — when it wasn’t being chewed by my daughter, Ananya, it was being dropped on a hard surface). And the software, ah, well, the software was wonderfully simple and usable. My love of the Nokia 6610 should probably be the subject of another article… Back to this story. In the past 6 months or so I was looking for some things that Nokia didn’t offer on the 6610 or on any other phone that fit what I was looking for — bluetooth, a good web browsing experience, and a directory that would store more than 200 contacts.
I sat on the decision to switch over to a new phone for a while and recently made the decision to switch over to Cingular because of the reviews I read about Cingular’s 2125 aka the HTC Faraday and because of the good things I had heard about Cingular’s EDGE data network. I was hesistant to move away from Nokia’s software, but decided to make the leap anyways because of everything I read, including Robert Scoble’s praise. Here are my thoughts so far…
The Hardware
The only reason the Cingular 2125 was even an option for me was that it packed a smartphone into a normal phone form factor. I know a lot of people are Treo fans, but I’ve never been able to handle its larger size. I’m not a clip-my-phone-on-my-belt kind of guy and the Treo has never been small enough to comfortably fit in my pocket (I don’t wear parachute pants). Plus I hate the fact that there are so many small buttons on the Treo (I know, I know, it’s the alphabet, but I guess I don’t plan to type text so much on my phone). I like phones with phone style keypads. So the size and weight of the 2125 are perfect for me, just a bit larger and heavier than my old Nokia 6610.
The keypad’s buttons are a little bit small and positioned low on the phone so dialing without looking is more difficult. But I’m getting used to it — I’m going on a slim finger diet. The tradeoff of the smaller keypad, obviously, is a much larger screen compared to the Nokia 6610. So the screen is nice, high-resolution and bright. I’m a bit concerned about scratching it, so I need to look into something to protect it with, something that doesn’t add much to the size of the phone.
Battery life appears to be OK, not as good as my Nokia 6610, but we’ll see how it holds up under regular usage.
I read a lot about how the 2125 power button was hard to use — I would have agreed with this until I figured out how to use it properly (press down, not in). It’s very easy to use once you figure it out.
The Software (Windows Mobile 5.0)
I love being able to surf the Internet from my phone. It’s practical and useful, the biggest “new” thing for me as a part of this upgrade. My favorite web apps / sites so far:
I’ve been using Internet Explorer as my browser but I did download Opera Mini to try it out. I’ve played around with it and like some things about it, namely, the way you can scroll up and down by page and how the font size can be adjusted to pack more information on the screen. But I haven’t delved into how to reconfigure Windows Mobile to use something other than IE as the default browser, or, for that matter, how to establish a direct link to a Java application like Opera Mini from the Windows Mobile “home page”. So anyways, at this point there isn’t anything compelling enough for me to switch to Opera Mini. Let’s see if that changes as I play with it more.
The app that I’ve been using to show off my 2125: Google Local for Mobile. I had to choose the Audiovox SMT5600 to get a version that works on the 2125 because the 2125 wasn’t listed (hopefully GLM adds it soon). This application is really, really cool. Do searches and get results on an interactive map. Zoom in on the map. Scroll around with the joystick. Choose the right matching result and get directions to and from that location. Click to dial the phone number for that location. It remembers your last x searches so you don’t have to search from scratch everytime. It’s another java app so I’ll have to figure out how to link directly to the application rather than going through the MIDIlet manager everytime I want to launch it. But it’s incredibly cool and useful.
Then there’s MSN Mobile, a piece of client software that came pre-installed on the 2125 that wraps a bunch of MSN services into a Windows Mobile client. MSN messenger was interesting, I had a couple of chats on Saturday with it and it worked well, but I had a really strange experience with it earlier today. The application hung up on me while it was trying to connect and it blocked all incoming calls (presumably because EDGE can’t be used at the same time as a voice phone call). I wasn’t able to kill the MSN messenger task using task manager so I had to reboot the phone to begin receiving incoming calls again. Scary that something on my phone could block incoming calls! I’m not running MSN messenger on my phone again…
A bit about the basic Windows Mobile interface: I can already feel the home screen getting cluttered up. Hotmail (which I never use!) installed an entry for itself on my home screen and after I sync’ed my outlook schedule and contacts, I’ve got a couple of daily schedule items on my home screen. Lot of stuff on my home screen now, there’s stuff I’d like to take off of there, there’s other stuff I’d like to add (like a link to gmail). Have to learn how to do this.
I send and receive a lot of SMS text messages so that part of the WM software is important to me. So far, I’m happy enough with how Windows Mobile does text messaging, even though my old Nokia did it better. There are matters of habit, like I’m used to the space button being the 0 on the keypad, not the #. I’m also used to having text messaging one button press away (with Windows Mobile, have to scroll down to the text messages option on the “home page” — or I have to go find the messages icon in start menu and then choose text messages). Once I’m entering words, I like the way Windows Mobile automatically learns new words. When I toggle between different modes of text entry (t9 vs T9 vs. abc vs. Abc vs. numbers vs. symbols), one of the modes (symbols) clears the screen and brings up a matrix of symbols — ack, confusing. I also find it annoying that using the joystick I can’t wraparound from the end of a line of text back to the beginning of that same line. Also, when I’m T9ing a proper noun, it lets me do one word stem and then another to build a word that it hasn’t already learned — that’s good. But let’s say I’m done T9ing something and then I go back to that word because, say I made a mistake, it doesn’t go back into T9 mode on that word. I have to delete and then re-T9 that word. Also, when a new message comes in, I want a single click to take me to read that message. As it stands, I have to click down to “text messages” and then choose it and then choose the message in question.
One other nitpick I have: I loved the way that my Nokia 6610 let me take a number down while talking on the phone and save it to the directory. So far, I haven’t seen this to be easily possible on my 2125. When I enter a number while talking on the phone, after the call is disconnected, that number is lost forever. Maybe I need to go into a “add contact” screen while talking on the phone. Maybe another example of less is more.
That’s it for now… More to come. I’m looking forward to getting all of my numbers transferred over to this phone from my Nokia. I’m also hoping to get a solid photo sync / slideshow app, preferably something that syncs with Flickr and/or Picasa. If you have a 2125 and have any tips on how to solve the problems I’ve talked about above or have a cool mobile website or application to recommend, please let me know!
I bought a Roku Labs Soundbridge on a special that they had two months ago and after breezing through setup and using it almost every day, I have one thing to say: it’s an excellent product. Setup: setting it up is what setup of any tech product should be like — it detected my wireless network automatically, found my imac full of music automatically, and within minutes I was listening to music. And I love the design too — the barrel shape is cool and different and it just works, at least in my particular setup (I’m using it to get music from an imac in the house to a receiver that powers speakers next to our pool/deck downstairs).