An Adobe Insider’s thoughts on the Apple-Flash Controversy

Steve Jobs public tirade (read here) against the ineffectiveness of Adobe Flash is probably the hottest thing on the web right now and rightfully so. For the millions of Apple “i” devices users it is utterly frustrating to see the message that the device requires the Adobe Flash plugin to make the website that you want to visit work, especially if the homepage itself is completely flash based (a very poor strategy to have from a technology point of view as of today). Thus, it was great to see some explanation on this issue by none other than Steve Jobs himself. While a lot of different people have different opinions on this, even the harshest of critics would agree that Adobe Flash technology is buggy and is the number one reason why a lot of browsers especially Microsoft Internet Explorer crash ( even Microsoft sided with Apple on this, read here).

However let’s be rational and non-biased. What does Adobe have to say in their defense to Apple’s bashing of their technology ? Not a lot actually, their CEO doesn’t really care about making a statement and neither is he that well known, their CTO, Mr. Kevin Lynch responds to Mr. Jobs 1700 word explanation with a 200 word response on the Adobe corporate blog (read here), steering clear of a number of issues like why Adobe has been so slow in showcasing their technology to Apple and convincing them that it is good enough to run on iPhone like devices.

Again to get into the heart of the matter, we talked to an Adobe Insider on the technical side to get their thoughts on the whole debate. Here’s what one of them had to say:

yes, Flash is a bit closed than usual web technologies…but not as closed as Apple’s whole eco-system. whether Jobs admits or not, he has his (company’s) own interest in pushing a Flash-less web…its the first step towards “monopolization“, and frankly, I won’t blame him. His company creates products that people buy (and services that ppl use - read iTunes); he’s surely in a definitive position to dictate what runs on his devices and what not…his mileage may vary, though.

and no, HTML5 is fraught from issues in its current form (although, in its defence, many of them are teething issues) and is very likely to change significantly before wide-spread adoption kicks-in…so Jobs is not right when he claims that he’s avoiding Flash as it is “past“…Flash may not be the future in the form it currently exists, but it is very much the present; in my opinion, he has no right to deny his users the present all the while hailing the future that may not exist (not due to lack of willingness in its adaptation, but for the lack of proper standardization, read here) in the form it is being proposed today - not to mention the fact that even the “present” support for the “future” is rather limited (sites like facebook are using workarounds - rather than using HTML5 - to run on Apple devices; just to make sure that ppl don’t stop using their site due to Apple obstinance)…but, a lot also depends upon the crowd’s willingness to accept Flash-less Apple devices.

Let’s accept that it’ll take a number of years before HTML 5 becomes as pervasive as Apple wants and till then it’ll be interesting to see whether there would be any change in consumer loyalty to Apple’s amazing products.

Traveling to Israel - Leave Your iPad at Home

Probably comes as a big surprise but it so happens that it’s highly risky and expensive to carry in iPad into Israel, one of world’s most technologically advanced countries. Apparently, Israel has been confiscating all iPads that enter the country because Israel’s Ministry of Communications believes that the iPad’s Wi-Fi system (802.11a/b/g/n) is configured for US standards and is not designed to conform to European standards.

The ministry officials argue that the iPad’s Wi-Fi operates at higher power levels and is liable to cause interference on the wireless frequency. Technologists however argue that the iPad uses the same Wi-Fi chip as the iPhone 3GS and it doesn’t make sense to allow one type of Apple device while banning the other. As an Apple devotee I doubt that Steve Jobs engineers would have missed out on any kind of specification that renders the iPad unusable in any country (read here to get an idea of their perfection).

It is interesting to note however that there has been some negative news regarding the iPad’s Wi-Fi capabilities ever since it came out and Israel is not the only place which has banned the iPad from entering their shores. Supposedly, Princeton University in New Jersey and the George Washington University in Washington D.C have also banned Apple’s latest gizmo from their campuses because it causes interference with the rest of the systems. Now compare this to an initiative by Rutgers university which is going to use the iPad to transform its MBA program with courses tailor-made for use on the iPad.

One things for sure, we definitely live in a world of extremes.

Stay tuned for more articles on the gadget of the year.

Sources: Time.com, Worldcorrespondents.com, ITwire.com, NJ.com

Nokia N97 - Has The Ultimate iPhone Killer Arrived

On December 2, 2008 Nokia announced the release of its flagship device in the N9X range – the N97 mobile computer. Its feature list is nothing short of impressive. QWERTY keyboard, a 3.5” touch screen interface, A-GPS with an electronic compass, TV Out, 5 MP Camera and (32+16) GB of storage ensure that there is not even a single feature that you could possibly want that is not provided. Just looking at the spec sheet fuzzes out the competition.

This device should change the way people connect to the internet and to each other. Tagged as the ‘Facebook phone’, this device is the weapon of choice for social networking freaks. It offers status updates from social networking sites right on their home page in an always on mode. This makes keeping tab of your friends kids play. Choc a bloc with sensors and interfaces this device is any gadget lover’s dream come true. It’s a mobile computer on steroids.

From the point of view of a N-series loyalist and the prospective buyers of this phone, which are basically smart phone users, there are a number of features that make the phone an experience in itself. As a customer of this phone, you get to ride on a blazing fast processor with 128 MB RAM and an extended battery life that makes you wonder whether you really need a PC anymore! Symbian 5th Edition ensures user enjoyment, smart simplicity and expandable experiences at the center of your mobile computing experience. Add to this a TV out port and you are all set to show off your escapades to friends and family.

Tired of typing on the keypad? Losing the human ‘touch’? The large 3,5″, bright nHD (640 x 360 pixels and 16:9 aspect ratio) TFT color display with resistive touch screen and tactile feedback changes the way you interact with your phone. Also, the increased spread of your screen brings in a new world of applications that allows you to do more in a smarter way. Web browsing on this screen coupled with a fully functional QWERTY keyboard is a breeze. The on board web browser works like a charm and for the very first time, users would find the experience of mobile browsing similar to a full sized desktop. Couple this with high speed 3G network capabilities and you remain connected.

With the Carl Zeiss ® 5 Megapixel camera the world is yours to capture. Immortalize life in DVD quality 16:9 video with dual LED flash. Another extremely interesting feature of the phone is the ability to Geo-tag all images through the on-board GPS. Coupled with this is a powerhouse of multimedia capability starting with a 32GB internal storage memory to archive all the latest music and videos in your collection. A 3.5 mm audio jack and a next generation interface supporting album art, its your very own DJ console station. See your So-Lo (Social Location) change as friends keep track of you. Update social networks with your status and real time info.

The N97 probably is going to be one of the biggest contenders to replace the iPhone. The past year saw the release of a bunch a of phones that were touted as iPhone killers(Samsung Omnia, HTC Diamond etc) but none of them managed to create the desired impact on the consumers.

Checkout the video below to get an insight into this cool device.

For more information on the power and features of the N97, click here.

Sms,Email,Twitter etc - Technologies That Save Lives

In the days of yore(upto the late 80’s) when there used to be a war in any part of the world or even in your own country, the only way to know about what was happening was through newspapers and radio. Indian parents who grow up during the 1960’s and 1970’s and witnessed numerous wars in the country, still narrate incidents of how they used dive into huge pits and bunkers that were dug at various places whenever they heard a plane pass by or any other loud sound.

Today, as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21^st century it is interesting to see the manner in which our lives have been transformed thanks to some amazing innovations and technologies. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in the 19^th century he would not have imagined that it would one day evolve into something that would enable a doctor working in the Democratic Republic Of Congo(DRC) to successfully complete an operation with detailed instructions from his colleague in London.

Vascular surgeon David Nott(who volunteers for Medicins Sans Frantieres for a month each year in Africa’s troubled Democratic Republic of Congo) had a 16 year-old patient whose arm had been ripped off, causing a wound that had become infected and gangrenous, leaving the teenage boy with just days to live. Nott realised that in order to save the child he would have to perform an operation called a forequarter amputation, involving the removal of the shoulder and collar bone; an operation that he had never before undertaken. So he texted a colleague back in London, who had previously carried out the procedure, and received step by step instructions back over SMS.

The cause of the child’s injuries was not clear, with some suggesting he had been bitten by a hippopotamus and other reports claiming he had been caught in the gun fighting that riddles the nation. 1,200 people die each day in the DRC from the conflict, according to the BBC, more than half of them children. Happily, the teenager on whom David Nott performed his first forequarter amputation made a full recovery. An interesting fact associated with DRC is that it has a very close relationship with the cellular industry, home as it is to significant quantities of coltan, an ore used to produce tantalum, which is used in the production of mobile phones.

Another case in point are the recent terror attacks in Mumbai. Mr. Shanbhag, who lives in Boston but happened to be in Mumbai when the attacks began on 26^th November, Wednesday, described the gunfire on his Twitter feed the thud, thud, thud of shotguns and the short bursts of automatic weapons. At the peak of the mumbai violence, more than one message per second with the word Mumbai in it was being posted onto Twitter, a short-message service that has evolved from an oddity to a full-fledged news platform in just two years. Those descriptions and others on Web sites and photo-sharing sites served as a chaotic but critically important link among people across the world whether they be Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn tracking the fate of a rabbi held hostage at the Nariman House or students in Britain with loved ones back in India or people hanging on every twist and turn in the standoff while visiting relatives for Thanksgiving dinner.

When you look at TV, you see one channel at a time, then you go to another channel, said Dina Mehta, an ethnographer and social media consultant in Mumbai. On Twitter, you get feeds from many different people at the same time.Citizen journalists avoided some of the bureaucratic headaches faced by media organizations (As reported by NYTimes, read here for more).

The above just goes to show the power of the Mobile Phone today. So a big thumbs up for all the Cell Phone manufacturers who have used their expertise and skill to create such products. Perhaps the government can learn from this and equip their critical forces with such technologies, cause in today’s world technology can be used to save lives and avert crisis.

Experience The Power Of Facebook At The Facebook Developer Garage

This organization was founded by a 23 year old Harvard Sophomore and membership was initially limited to only Harvard students. This online social networking platform has over 120 million users worldwide today and is slowly becoming a replacement for one’s visiting card. This website has also been banned in some countries like Syria and Iran as it was used to criticize government authorities.

If you aren’t reading the above facts for the first time then you’re surely a devoted user of the Social Networking Platform Facebook. Facebook was launched on the 4^th of February, 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg while attending Harvard University as a sophomore. The site was originally called “The FaceBook” and was hosted at thefacebook.com. Mark later on changed it to facebook.com after purchasing the domain name for $200,000.

Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard College, and within the first month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard were registered on the service. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. This expansion continued when it opened to all Ivy League schools and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States. In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California. In October 2008, Facebook announced that it was to set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.

Over these past few years and especially in the last year, facebook has triggered a Social Networking revolution given it’s amazing design and the power of it’s platform. If you’re a keen traveler and often meet a number of people at various social events then you would have definitely noticed that all conversations normally end with the line, “It was nice meeting you, Are you On Facebook“. In most cases one ends up getting a friend request within a few days and sometimes even instantly if the person you met had a facebook application on his mobile phone. Zuckerberg, the face behind Facebook who’s made it to the cover of Newsweek some time back and is reportedly worth $3 billion however has not been fazed by the success of his website, he still sits at a desk like the other software engineers, writing computer code. (Check here for more).

Needless to say that the Facebook platform has the ability to create custom facebook applications provides it with a tremendous revenue potential that Facebook is keen on exploiting. The Facebook Developer Garage is one such initiative which provides an opportunity to people to dive deep into the Facebook Platform: it is a forum to share ideas with local developers, look for partners on your latest project, see and participate in Facebook App demonstrations, seek technical support, or just network and socialize with other developers interested in the Facebook Platform.

In general, these garages comprise of ad hoc presentations, brainstorming sessions with other developers, and social interaction time. Some Garages also offer Q&A time with Facebook Platform Engineers, either via video conference or in person. This month the Facebook Developer Garage comes to Delhi on the 29^th of November at Tekriti Software, Gurgaon. Check here for more details on the venue. So whether you’re a Facebook Enthusiast, a Technology Professional or a Socialite attend the Garage and learn the inner secrets and future plans of your favorite social networking site.

More Power To Your Email With GMail Video Chats

About a decade back when the Internet was still in it’s early period and no one had even thought of terms like Web 2.0 or Social Networking, people used to consider communicating by e-mail as a privilege and having an e-mail address was considered to be a status symbol. At that point and even for many years after that, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail were the only major e-mail providers. Their e-mail services provided only basic word-processor utilities and a meager space of just 1-2 Mb. These companies never developed a strategy around their e-mail service and never looked to improvise it in any way for many years.

All that changed however after the arrival of Google and it’s e-mail service Gmail. The arrival of Gmail and it’s 1Gb of storage space was a revolution as no one else provided that much space back then. Even now Gmail’s ever growing account space (over 7 Gb as of today) is far more than that of Hotmail and Yahoo. And while it may still lag behind Microsoft and Yahoo in terms numbers (Gmail is only the third-largest email service worldwide, with 113 million users, while Microsoft Live mail is on top with 283 million users, closely followed by Yahoo Mail with 274 million) it is still one of the most innovative in spite of the fact that it has been in beta for 4 years and has a number of other problems and flaws associated with it.

Google has a completely different division called Gmail Labs (you can see this as the rightmost option in the settings page of your Gmail) and offers a range of amazing features like Forgotten Attachment Detector, Google Calender Gadget, Google Docs Gadget and much more. Needless to say the most amazing feature of Gmail is the Gmail chat which is boon for all employees across the world as many organizations do not permit the use of Instant messengers during office hours.

A couple of days back Gmail integrated Video chat into it’s Gmail chat service thereby allowing gmail users to have a video conference with each other. Gmail Video and Voice requires a browser plug-in and either a microphone (for straight audio chatting) or a Webcam (for video and audio chatting) to function. The plug-in — a proprietary, non-Flash-based system — runs about 2MB and supports Chrome, Firefox 2.0+, Internet Explorer 7.0, and Safari 3.0. As of now, the video chat service will not be made available within the standalone Google Talk application. Once the plug-in is installed, all you do is click on a contact within your Gmail Chat list. If they also have the required software, a camera icon will pop up next to their name and let you initiate a two-way multimedia session. If they don’t have the hardware, you can still start a one-way session in which they’ll be able to see and hear you, even if you can’t see and hear them. The service is expected to be fully rolled out to all Gmail users by the end of Tuesday.

The technology, by the way, comes from Google’s acquisition of video conferencing software by Marratech last year. Google hired the engineers involved in the software, at the time declining to reveal its ultimate plans (Source). Gmail’s new video and audio calling feature definitely sets aside Google’s email service from competition. Now a one-stop communications hub, Gmail will certainly become ever more popular among both email and avid chat users. While other upcoming (or delayed) features such as SMS Chat in Gmail will again raise the bar against competition (Source).

Microsoft Surface - Technology That You Can Feel

Remember the film Minority Report starring Tom Cruise and Colin Farrel. The 2002 science fiction film directed by Steven Spielberg was set in the year 2054, where a special police department called “Precrime” apprehends criminals based on foreknowledge, provided by three psychics termed “precogs“. While the movie depicted a number of technologies related to the film’s theme, most of them seemed quite far-fetched if imagined in today’s world.

The image depicted above was one of the main attractions of the movie and the film audiences were quite awed by the sight of such a technology. Well, it might sound surprising but in the next 5 years or so, such a technology could actually become a reality, thanks to something known as Surface Computing. Surface computing is the term for the use of a specialized computer GUI in which traditional GUI elements are replaced by intuitive, everyday objects. Instead of a keyboard and mouse, the user interacts directly with a touch-sensitive screen. It has been said that this more closely replicates the familiar hands-on experience of everyday object manipulation.

Surface computing by it’s definition seems to be an amazing technology which could really change the way people live. “Imagine a world where you can walk into your favorite restaurant and navigate through the menu displayed on the surface of your table. You can choose any item that you like and instantly an array of options are available at your fingertips. For instance, say you wish to try the Chicken Sizzler. As soon as you touch the menu option you are shown a picture of how the sizzler would look like, you can look at videos of the dish being made, it’s calorific and nutritional value, the number of people who order that dish per day etc. And that’s not it, at the end of your mail you can just place your credit card on the table and complete the transaction, sounds really amazing doesn’t it “.

The video below shows a real life implementation of such a technology that has been brought to life by Microsoft. Microsoft Surface (Codename: Milan), is a Multi-touch product from Microsoft which is developed as a software and hardware combination technology that allows a user, or multiple users, to manipulate digital content by the use of natural motions, hand gestures, or physical objects. It was announced on May 29, 2007 at the D5. Initial customers will be in the hospitality businesses, such as restaurants, hotels, retail, public entertainment venues and the military for tactical overviews. The preliminary launch was on April 17, 2008, when Surface became available for customer use in AT&T stores. Surface is also being used in the CBS series CSI: MIAMI, where the crime lab uses it for investigation purposes, the MSNBC coverage of the 2008 US presidential election, Disneyland’s future home exhibits, and various hotels and casinos.

The product idea for Surface was initially conceptualized in 2001 by Steven Bathiche of Microsoft Hardware and Andy Wilson of Microsoft Research. It’s amazing to see how Microsoft has managed to create such a cool technology using a highly buggy and much criticized OS like Windows Vista as Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a table, topped with a 30-inch reflective surface in a clear acrylic frame.

The last few years haven’t really seen any great innovations from Microsoft, but Surface seems to be something revolutionary. So while the first decade of the 21^st century probably belonged to Google and Apple, the next might see MS coming back with a bang.

Tags: microsoft, surface, tom, cruise, windows, vista, future, technology, feel, touch, revolutionary, apple, google

Hear It, Record It and SHAZAM, You Got It

Imagine yourself in the following situations and just try to think what is common to all of them :

• On the way to or from work you hear an amazing track on the radio that you’ve heard many times before and you really liked. You would love to get hold of this track for your iPod but you just don’t know the name of track or the artist.
• You are at a club or at a bar having a good time with your friends and you hear a track that catches your fancy, it would be great if you could catch hold of that track to add it to your collection but again “How do you find out the track information ? “

The above are just a few scenarios where you just wished that there was a way you could find out the track information of the song you were hearing. Well, if you’re still wishing then it’s get ready to rejoice cause your prayers have just been answered. Shazam ID, Music ID or Track ID are the latest technologies that allow people to find out the track information of any song just by recording the first few seconds of that song. Pioneered and developed by Shazam Entertainment, a privately held company headquartered in London, this technology is designed for mobile handsets which have access to the internet.

So how does one use Music Id. Simple, the Music Id application resides on your phone which has access to the internet either via GPRS, 3G or Wi-Fi. As soon as you hear a song that you like, you turn on the application and choose the option to find the music id of the song. As soon as you do this the application records the song for 5 seconds, sends the data to a database and within the next 5 seconds you have the information about the song that you were looking for. So basically in just 10 seconds one can find out all the information about a particular track. Shazam uses a patented fingerprinting technology that recognizes practically any audio that is within the recognition database very quickly and with a very small amount of audio even under heavy noise. Shazam’s internals are, no doubt, “commercially confidential“, however there is some information on possible algorithms available on the web.

The basic game is to compute a spectrogram at points of peak intensity in the music; the argument here is that a piece of music is, roughly speaking, characterized by how the loudest bits sound. At each peak in each piece of music, the spectrogram is divided into 180 buckets with frequencies between 200 and 2000Hz, and an entire piece of music is described by a sequence of such 180-value spectrograms, stored with their time position in the song. Matching is done by computing a similar sequence of spectrograms from the query (as recorded from your telephone or whatever) and searching for similar spectrograms in the database of known songs (sure, all this is not so easy to understand for the layman, but see here if you wish to know more technical details).

Shazam ID or Music ID is now available for a number of different phone models and was recently also introduced for the iPhone. It’s a really cool application and is great way to impress your friends or even win over people that you may like. The video below shows a practical use case of Music Id as well as a demonstration.

Looks great doesn’t it. So now the next time you need to find something about a track that you hear, just relax and Shazam it.

Its Here And It Rokx - Google Chrome, The Real Web 2.0 Browser

They say that the key to selling a product effectively is to market it well and that Marketing is all about understanding the importance of the 4 P’s, price, product, placement and promotion. So while Apple has been really smart to have been able to sell millions of iPhones for more than a year now using a marketing strategy which highlighted all of the new features of the iPhone while hiding all it’s flaws(there are number e-mails doing the rounds highlighting the some of simple features that the iPhone lacks), google on the other hand has developed it’s brand by providing excellent quality products that no one can resist from using (although most of their products never make it past beta). Also unlike most other brands google hardly spends any money on marketing and announces it’s products only a day or two before it’s launch, thereby creating great curiosity on the day of the launch.

So a couple of weeks back there wasn’t much known about Google’s plans to release a browser, but the next few days are all going to be about Chrome, Google’s New Open Source web browser. Google took the unusual step of announcing its new browser via an online comic, the first page of which is shown below.

Google chrome is built on the WebKit engine which is used by Safari, Adobe AIR, iPhone, and Android. It has a brand new look and feel with the tabs occupying the top of the window, which gives you a really different browser experience. Some of the cool features of chrome are given below while you can check out the rest here.

• Whenever you create a new tab in chrome, instead of bringing up a blank page or home page, it creates a “new tab” page that shows links and images to the most visited pages, recently closed tabs and search engine boxes for favorite sites such as Yelp, Wikipedia and Amazon. In Google Chrome, there is also an “incognito window” feature - which is much like the private browsing feature found in IE8.
• Google Chrome promises to be more stable than IE(which is now the worst browser in the world) and Firefox 3 as each browser tab will run in its own process so a buggy web page won’t take down the entire browser. This also means that if you 6 tabs open in a single window you can see 6 processes running in your Operating system’s process manager and not just one.
• One can very easily move the tabs around and reorder them.Also each tab will have its own controls and its own URL bar, which Google’s developers are calling the ‘Omnibox‘.
• Google Chrome has a private browsing mode - if you create what it calls an “iincognito window” then pages won’t be saved in your history and when you close the window, any related cookies will be deleted.
• Google Chrome will feature a new JavaScript virtual machine. Google says this will be more efficient at running JavaScript-heavy apps such as Gmail, and allow smoother drag-and-drops.

There is wide speculation the chrome is a very serious threat to IE and would soon go on to rule the browser market, however it doesn’t seem that Google wants to compete with Microsoft in anyway because Google’s products are mostly open-source and are far superior than any of Microsoft’s products. By giving away the code, Google is practically begging other browser makers (including the top two–Microsoft and Mozilla) to take pieces from their browser and incorporate them into their own.

Well we had a great time writing this post in chrome and quite frankly it is a really good browser. It’ll take a while for it penetrate the browser market and it would be interesting to see if the big organizations across the world would think of migrating their business and enterprise applications to be compatible with Chrome. Now all we need is a brand new Operating System from Google that would be pre-loaded with all of google’s products and if it works anywhere as good as their search engine or their applications then people won’t even mind paying decent money for it. If you wish to know more about the thinking behind chrome, then checkout the comic here or watch the video below.

Now if you can’t wait to try the chrome, then download it here.

Tags: google, chrome, IE, firefox, mozilla, internet, browser, experience, web, rocks, marketing

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