MoMo talk for April

This month's Mobile Monday talk was held on 28th April at Nokia premises and was sponsored by Nokia. Ashish Thomas from Singtel group talked on "Steady Innovation for Future Mobile Services". And then Ganapathy Subramaniam from MyDuniya showed some demo of their service platform and the various services available. To conclude, a Forum Nokia representative explained the various developer activities that Forum Nokia was participating in.

To start off, Ashish explained the various services that Singtel had started off or was trialing in the various Asian markets where they operate like Singapore and Australia. Three of the services he mentioned were Location Based service, Next Bus arrival service using GPS and webmail service. I am not sure if I got it right, but the talk fell short of the expectations since Ashish was talking more from an operator's view than services in general. Or probably I had a different picture going into the talk.

Ganapathy showed various services myduniya offers. They are currently in public beta which they launched just a couple of days back. MyDuniya seems to be a platform that tries to bring a lot of the services (which could be taken for granted if one had internet connectivity on their phone) to the consumers via a SMS based service. Once you register with the service by sending an SMS, you can avail many services like sending group SMS, setting and getting reminder notes, sharing of files, sending of mail just by sending SMS etc. And a lot more utility services are supposed to be in pipeline as per Ganapathy, but all driven by SMS. The suite of services does have some traction but I think they should move away from services that are ubiquitous like sending of SMS to group and move into areas that are still not unexplored. Most of the rural and semi-urban folks are unlikely to opt for data based plans or might not have a browser/internet enabled handsets, hence services that are targeted towards them would make the service more meaningful. My 2 cents :)

ACM monthly talk on RIA

I attended the talk on Rich Internet Applications (RIA) by Mrinal Wadhwa at this month's ACM monthly talk held at the Computer Society of India premises on 26th April, saturday.

The subject matter of the talk was really quiet alien to me but given the buzz around AIR, Silverlight and AJAX and given that this was an introductory session, I attended the talk anyways. The attendance was quite good with around 20-25 folks and all of them from some well known companies and working on enterprise solutions. There were some startup folks in as well. Mrinal went over what RIA is and how it has evolved over the years and then moved to Flex, Flash programming and Adobe AIR. Later on the talk was more inclined towards the Adobe RIA technologies. He showed some of the desktop applications written using Adobe AIR and they looked quite impressive. We also created some very simple web app and desktop app using Adobe AIR technology with the same base code and shown how the desktop and the web are coming together. Mrinal's talk was full of energy, the presentation slides were slick and the attendants were really knowledgeable. The talk and the discussions went on for almost 2.5 hours which was well over the stipulated time of 1 hour. All in all, a great time.

The presentation slides are available at the acm website here.

Startup School 2008 talks and DHH

Startup School 2008 is one of the initiatives sponsored by the YC folks. This time it was held on 19th April and the guest talks featured some of the most eminent folks of our industry including Jeff Bezos, Paul Graham, DHH, Michael Arrington and Marc Andreessen. The videos are available at justin.tv and omnisio. The talks that are available at omnisio are great, the video and audio quality is good and the presentation slides are clear. However, after nearly half of the presentation the talks seem to get stuck. So I would advice you to use the justin.tv to listen to the talks and use omnisio to look at the presentation slides.


Watch live video from HackerTV on Justin.tv

Though I have not looked at all the videos myself but the talk by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), the creator of Rails is a must listen to and seems to be the best of the lot. While all the other guests were stressing on how to pitch to the VC's and raising funds and how to be bought by the googles and yahoos, DHH went the complete opposite way and talked about how to build a business that sustains itself by charging the customers for the service. DHH is a great communicator and puts across his views really well with some slick slides. And hence his talks are always enjoyable. The links for DHH talk are here for justin.tv and here for omnisio.

Barcamp Bangalore 6 : Summer Edition

Once again barcamp time. The 6th edition of Barcamp Bangalore will be held on 19th and 20th april at IIMB. As during previous versions, expect a lot of interesting talks and interactive sessions.

Nice styles for web

The look and feel of any web page depends on the CSS style sheet specified by the author of the web page and the CSS style sheet chosen by the user as per his need or preference. The browser applies these stylesheets in a methodical way and the result is what you witness in the browser.

Stylish is a firefox extension which utilises the above concept to make the web sites look more stylish and personalized. A number of styles are available at userstyles. There are different ways in which one can apply the styles.

1. Site styles affect only the certain site for which a style has been defined for eg: a style for gmail.com.
   
2. App styles are applicable to only the particular mozilla application for which the style was conceived.
3. Global styles as the name implies, applies to all the sites. These styles can perform generalized tasks such as ad blocking or providing prettier form controls.

The screenshot is gmail web page when applied with one of the gmail specific style. In order to get this style for gmail,

1. goto firefox add-on's page and install the stylish extension. Once installed, you will notice a stylish icon at the right end corner of the status bar of firefox.
2. login to gmail. Right click on the icon, a menu pops up. Click on "Find Styles for this Page". A new tab opens listing all the available styles for gmail. If you choose any one of them, a new page opens and you will notice a button called "Load into Stylish". If you click on it, you will be able to preview and save it.
   
3. Once saved, whenever you visit the specific web page the style becomes active and visible.

The style used for the gmail screenshot above is "Gmail Redesigned (by Globex Designs)". The same procedure applies for using any style. I really love the possibilities with this extension. Happy exploring...

Starting something

I have been having some really calm and idle days at work lately. That gave me enough reason to get back to reading some interesting tech stories and biographies, something I really enjoy.

Couple of weeks back, I bought probably a must-read book for aspiring entrepreneurs - Starting Something: An Entrepreneur's Tale of Control, Confrontation & Corporate Culture by Wayne McVicker. The book details the journey of two entrepreneurs - Wayne and Jeff and their story about improving the healthcare industry through their company - neoforma.com.

The author takes you through the entire journey - right from their frustration with their employer's reluctance for change, incorporation of the company, initial investors, multiple rounds of funding, dealing with VCs, recruitment of employees and leaders, IPO and corporate culture. And after a while after IPO, both of them moved out of neoforma when one of the divisions was spun off as a separate entity.

Right after reading I checked out how Neoforma was doing now and found that it has since been acquired by GHX (Global Healthcare Exchang).

I recommend this book to everyone and especially to folks interested in startups and entrepreneurship. On the same note, payne has written a nice introductory article on Startup Equity For Employees, which answers in brief all sort of options and stock related doubts one might have while joining a startup.