Emergintex

Saturday evening: You have some friends over for dinner, and you are showing your large collection of photographs since you last met your buddies. You remember you had this awesome view of a sandy beach you visited in Greece, but if only you can find that image in time to show it.

Riya steps in: Being the smart kid you have been, you made sure to let Riya take care of your gigantic photo collection, the last evening, so today you just need to log onto the free service Riya offers and just search for ‘Sandy’ and Riya brings out your collection of images tagged as Sandy.

You would say that this is nothing new, a simple tag search is what happened here. But looking closely you see a couple of pics with another friend of yours. Now whats he doing here ! What happened here is Riya recognizing your friend Sandy in a couple of pics and showing those pics too.

This is good. This is technology at work. This is not a regular photo searching/tagging service. This is something more than a SQL Query being run against a tag. Well maybe at the end it is. But whats interesting here is the way it all starts. the way you train and educate Riya about looking inside your pictures. You start by telling the system who is who in the pictures.

You can also sync your address book with Riya, so that every time you identify a new person for Riya, you can pick their name and email automatically from the address book instead of wasting time by typing the details. You can also choose to search a photo set for pre-identified people from the address book. Riya will search and auto tag the shortlisted pictures.

In addition it has another nice feature of specifying the privacy settings for a set of pictures. Whats better than automatically controlling the album permissions by looking at the pictures in the album itself. I persume Riya looks at the identifiable people in the pics, looks them up in the address book, and ties it to the permission framework (I might be wrong).

When I look at a new concept, I see how much of a practical problem the concept is solving for the masses. Riya promises to solve most of the searching and tagging problems with any computer user who has a considerable sized photo collection on the disk(s) or on the web.

Would there be any kind of API support for the framework? Would love to see a Media Center extension, that lets me do all the searching from my TV. Thats the easiset way for Riya get into our living-rooms and be a part of the lifestyle.

The Riya team looks well experienced and promising too, to keep up with the promises and opportunities Riya can open.

Technorati tags: Riya,recognition

.Net, Java, C++, PHP, Ruby on Rails and so much more. The list grows every year and each new entrant has its own followers. Each of these languages/platforms have their own specific domain where they excel, but when it comes to delivering something to the desktop of an average user, which one rules? Is it C++ (for Windows applications)? Or is Java still brewing on the desktop? Is .Net being used to create commercial applications for the desktop? Or are people looking at Rich Client Platform from Eclipse, to write commercial applications for the desktop?

Microsoft used the Windows usage to propogate .Net platform, but is it really being used by commercial applications? Is Vista going to change this landscape a little bit more towards .Net ?

Sun had used in the past the internet boom to make the Duke ride on the applet wave, but do we see real commercial application of Java applications in real world? (Except for those applet based advertisements to hit Osama to win a free iPod!)

What I see is that most of the startups if targeting the desktop are using VC++ to harness MFC and native interaction with the OS. Is this still the defacto platform for startups targeting Windows based applications?

Morfik is gearing up for a Morfik Pioneer Program to be opened on 21st October. Cant wait to get my hands on it, and get on an exciting ride with Morfik. Getting tools of this type out in the wild will push the concept of WebOS with much strength. This could also mean bringing the web applications to the desktop and take desktop applications to the web in much faster and productive manner.

I am sure lots of people are waiting on seeing Morfik in action themselves, which is obvious by now confirmed rumors about Ray Ozzie, CTO Microsoft spending some time at Morfik booth during the Web2.0 conference. Also Sergey Brin showed some interest in Morfik.

Update: I am still waiting on this one. Not sure if anyone else got the MPP yet or not.

Technorati tags: Morfik

We are done with Web2.0 for this year. What good did it give to us? Maybe we got some cool applications like Meebo & Morfik. But at the end of the day these are just some applications that would be available online for the more than average user. Whats in store for the average users? Do we need a phase shift in the technology to include the average user and introduce some ‘non application-centric’ concepts.

This is what I would call LifeStyle2.0. Microsoft & Apple are already changing how you look at home entertainment. Though at this moment its not available to the average users but its a start. Microsoft with Media Center and Apple to some extent now with FrontRow are moving towards LifeStyle2.0.

For us to make a considerable change in next 10-15 years in daily lives of an average user, using broadband and highspeed connectivity as a platform, companies like Microsoft need to start shaping things in the coming year.

• Where is our ‘connected intelligent home’ reality? There are some sporadic implementations, but surely not for an average user.
• Where is our ‘intelligent entertainment system’ that would get the right stream at the right time for the right family member?
• Whats happening with the automobile industry?
• Where are smart mobiles?

Autmobile industry for example is doing a great work at this moment, trying to converge the gap between the technology being used in our automobiles & the technology available on our desktops. Car manufacturers are on full throttle to bring automobiles that would integrate with your mobile/pda via Bluetooth as soon as you sit in. Implementations of this are already out by Acura, BMW & Mercedes Benz for example. This is one awesome integration that lets you bring your mobile in your car systems.

What about personal services outside our desktop screens? When would we have smart devices around the home, that would be self contained providers of services to the owners, all thriving on one single backbone: the broadband. Today if I need to get something current, why do I have to go to my desktop (or the TV) to start getting it so I can see & hear it. Why are my emails, ummm emails? Why cant they be available to me outside my virtual mailbox, say on my breakfast table, same as conventional mails?

We just heard that Apple might be coming out with a networked version of iPod in the next year or so. We also have the Nokia 770 in pipeling later this year (not much time left!). I would look at these devices as stepping stones or the building blocks of a bigger eco-system that would evolve towards LifeStyle2.0. How can I forget Sony PSP. Today it just plays games and a bit fo surfing, but maybe tommorow it evolves into my more intelligent service provider and integration point for the rest of service providers around me.

Well, we gotta wait and watch…

Hemant commented it here.
Russ predicted it here.
Apple launched it here.

I am sure the stage is set to see a iPhone in one year. It would be the perfect integration of Apple design, and perfect mobile capabilities. Nothing like a blunder called Rokr. Moto guys need to go back to the drawing board for that new iPhone. It has to has the Apple shell on it. The Apple usability in it.

Technorati tags: ipod, apple, iPhone.

Google has done it again! Google reader is a feed reader unlike any other feed reader I have seen. The UI is crisp and slick ! It has AJAX powered UI (as everything else has today). You can search for content using a ‘Search for new Content’ button and then subscribe to your favorite feeds.

Once the subscriptions are added to your Reader, you can navigate to ‘Your Subscriptions’, which shows you the following UI.

Clicking on a different post offcourse shows the content of that post, with a nice slider effect on the left side, moving the slider to the current post header. At the bottom of the post, you are shown the labels the post author has used to tag his/her post. You can add your own tags to this post, to make searching easier through your subscribed blogs. This is another way of grouping posts from different blogs under one tag to search & retrieve them at a later point in time.

You can label your feeds to group them together. Selecting a feed changes the UI at the bottom, to get all the new posts from the blog on the left side, with a nice slider effect on the posts, and the post content on the right side. The UI is shown as follows:

So far my experience has been going wonderful—>ok. The service seems a bit slow at the moment. Could be the high hitting traffic. Sometimes the system just stays on with a layer saying ‘loading…’. I am sure this is something I am using for next day or two and getting the best out of it, and then decide on long term usage.

Om Malik has his thoughts on it…

Technorati tags: Google Reader

Ok. I have been using IE7 exclusively now for over a month or so. Reason being down there I still like the cleaninness of IE over Firefox. Most web pages target IE first and then anything else.

Due to the above reason I end up having 7-10 tabs in one window of IE. Here the problems start to show. Not problems, but one big problem. Its not a bug, but its an annoying user experience. Take the scenario below:

You have 10 tabs (numbered 1-10 from left to right). You are on tab 1. You click on a link to open it up in a new tab (tab #11). Now tab #11 is active and you read a couple of lines there and you decide to close that tab by right clicking on the #11 tab and select “Close”. Now, I would prefer to see IE show up some intelligence to bring my previous tab as active tab (tab #1). Instead what I get to see now is the last tab in the series (tab #10).

I guess it should be simple enough to remember previous active tab, and an option (somewhere in Tools/Options) to set this switching. I am sure more & more users would like to get back to the previous active tab, instead of the last tab in the series.

Open to discuss this with anyone from the IE7 team who owns this.

Technorati tags: IE7

Lots happening in the ethernet today.

1. Web 2.0 Conference is on from today. You can see the latest pics and blogs.

2. 24HLaundry pulled up the sheets from thier playground, Ning. It all sounds like something with a potential, but so far I havent seen the working mechanisms to build a social application using Ning framework.
I am still waiting for my developer account. Untill we some really useful application out on Ning playground, the potential is untapped.

3. Ojos is still pre-beta. They have sent out invites to get high res pics for the beta site. This is one of the coolest upcoming apps, that I am waiting for. It has an clear application. It solves a real concrete problem which is out there on every desktop. Munjal Shah’s blog is the point if you wanna read more about Ojos. A point that I am missing though in whole process is, what will be the user experience. It would be good if someone from the Ojos team can put up a simple workflow, outlining what will be the user experience to use this service. Does the user need to upload the pics to be tagged, is there a client install involved, what about the Java VM?

4. Web 2.0 Conference will also be the place where guys from downunder will unveil Morfik. This is another favorite of mine. Lots of potentials. Lots of implementations where Morfik would help speed up the process of developing AJAX enabled apps. Morfik is one thing which can change the curernt perception of an application. Today applications are either web based or desktop based. Morfik is one tool which would bridge the gap between these 2 types of applications.

Technorati tags: web2.0, morfik, ojos, ning, AJAX

Google plans to offer free wifi service across San Francisco! Om just got this breaking news a day after celebrating his birthday. Way to go Om , to get us that breaking news !

Technorati tags: Google

I came across this comment in my last post about Web 2.0. I got in touch with Martin to know more about Morfik. One thing that resonates between my preception of Web2.0 and the mantra at Morfik, is:

bring Web Applications to the Desktop and takes Desktop Applications to the Web

This is how I look at next generation application development in conjunction with Web2.0. Another thing that drives Morfik is the fact that we need some better tools to allow developers write better and productive AJAX applications. AJAX by itself provides the concept, but most of the work is still done old school way: hand code the JavaScript.

Morfik promises to change this. The Morfik development environment lets developers write a full blown application, from the page logic to database design. The Morfik Visual Designer allows you to design your application schema. It comes with a bundled Firebird RDBMS for you to get started with. There are I guess options to connect to other RDBMS’. You can then design your page layouts within the designer. You basically design your different pages, which at run time ‘morph’ into each other, giving a perception of an desktop application, rather than a web application.

Next up your application business logic can be written in one of the supported high level Object Oriented languages (C++/C#/Java/Delphi). Once you have your business logic, you pass it through the JavaScript Synthesis Technology, which compiles your business logic in one single AJAX engine file.

Morfik also has support for generating PDF reports of your data, which can be used for high quality printing.

Immediate advantages:

Morfik is presenting a cool demo of how 2 Morfik programmers built a ‘pixel-by-pixel’ match of GMail’s interface and functionality, in the upcoming Web2.0 Conference in San Francisco on Oct 5-7, 2005. You can read more about JavaScript Synthesis Technology here.

I am sure it would be fun to write something using Morfik and whip out some nice AJAX based applications for the web (or desktop!).

Technorati tags: Morfik, Web2.0, Ajax