A Tech’s Jab @ everything Online

You can still hear the echoes from the swearing-in ceremony of the 44th President of the United States of America, Barrack Obama. The focal point of all these discussions, News paper articles and blogs have been based on speculation if Obama will deliver. We at ‘Jabtec’ take a different view as usual. We see Obama as a product that adds value to America Inc. The massive campaign launched by Obama before the elections has helped create a huge image makeover for the president of the United States. An example of the power of brand Obama is the number of Television channels in India broadcasting the Inauguration ceremony of the 44th president. More than 20 regional channels were airing the live feed from the Inauguration ceremony, an unprecedented event for a country whose regional channels thrive by selling cheap soaps to women over the age of 40. All this goes a long way in proving that America has been in desperate need of a leader of world class standards for the past 8 years and Obama just delivered. We will just have to wait and see if his actions speak louder than his words. As for the Indian politicians who are still banking on Vote-Bank politics to win elections, Buck up buddies, Obama has set the bar real high and we Indians are very much awake and watching!!

Twitter has made quite a noise with their superb messaging system. People have found many uses for twitter from giving out a simple “what are you doing” personal update to using it to collaborate with colleagues during business hours to share information quickly. The latest addition to twitters usability is to broadcast news snippets. When you want to make some noise about anything, you can use twitter. Twitter was first used as a news/public discussion stream during the U.S presidential campaign and elections. It is in a similar way in which twitter was used as a news service during the recent Mumbai Terrorist attack. Users where twittering all kinds of information about the location of the armed forces, location of terrorists and even information that regular journalists were having a hard time gathering were being twittered by the users. The tweets became so elaborate that the Indian Government appealed to the users to stop Twittering about the incident till it was over, due to security reasons. 

The best thing about twitter is its ease of use in any information sharing campaign, the bad is that it is very disorganized. When multiple users send the tweets, although large amounts of information is shared, organizing the information becomes a head-ache. If this is ironed out, twitter can more easily be used as a news stream.

www.power.com is the latest addition to the websites aimed at unifying your Social Networks. Although this is a not a new concept, power.com carries it out in style.  You can access your Orkut, Facebook, Myspace and Hi5 accounts under the same roof and in the same format without having to even leave the page. Power.com virtualizes as the multi-cuisine restaurant of social networks and with a singe power iD and you get access to all the updates from your friends in different social networks. One of the best things about power.com is that you can broadcast a message to people in different social networks at the same time. In addition to the much hyped social networks, power.com also connects your email and instant messaging accounts and brings all of them under one manageable platform.

The way it works is by getting the login information for different social networks from the user and then accessing those networks as if it were the user and sending out the information from the social network to the user’s power page. Power.com is also powered by Advertisements that are displayed on various pages that are displayed. With the number of Social Networks and Instant messengers used per user getting more, a service like power.com is not a luxury but becomes a necessity in avoiding chaos in our online lives.

Leave it to Google to think up the coolest free services. Brainiacs at Google have come up with this novel way of enabling the mobile users in India to do a google search through SMS. Google has identified the huge potential of mobile based services in India and capitalizing on the ever growing number of mobile users, Google has launched the Google SMS in India where users can send the right keywords as an SMS to a special Google number and get the information they desire right there on their mobile phone. The easy access of information Google provides ranges from Local news, Cricket News, Movie Schedule Flight schedule, train Schedule, Stock Quotes, Business Search, Weather, Currency search etc. From a Business point of view, Google wishes to spread their wings in India by whetting the appetite and passion that Indians have for information, Mobile Phones and Free stuff.

You can try out Google SMS on your mobile by sending an sms to 9-77-33-00000. You will be only charged the normal sms charge as per your mobile plan for sending sms to the above number.

For more information on this service, you can visit the Google SMS page

You-Tube Live is a new feather to You-Tube’s hat. The event titled ‘You-Tube Live’ kicked off on 22nd November 2008 , streamed live from san francisco. This event saw performers who had been popularised by you-tube entertaining the crowd. Some of the prominent names are Joe Satriani, Will.I.Am, Mythbusters, Akon, Chad Vader, Fun Two, Bo Burnham and Jason Latimer. The event had approximately 700000 concurrent views.

Sparing other details, let us concentrate on the big question at hand. Why Live? You tube has been a shoot, Upload and watch site, why should it even start a Live Channel. My two cents: You-Tube Live’s first event had 700000 concurrent users world wide. That’s a huge number of people watching the same thing at once. Which in turn could be converted in to a huge number of people to whom targeted ads can be delivered. If You-Tube live could be used to power popular Live events in the world to a world audience as opposed to the regular television networks delivering the same content to their geo-specific audience, it would make great sense in terms of cost effective Live Production.

We can safely assume that You-Tube Live event that took place on 22nd Nov was only a testing event by the you-tube team by using real people as Lab rats to see the response rate for such events and to check and verify other technical issues during a live stream where millions watch at the same time. But none of us can complain as we have all pledged our oath-to-death to Google and they are also fulfilling their part by providing quality content packed with related advertisement. Hail Google!! Long LIVE You-Tube!!

Matched.co.uk, the leading blog advertisement platform in the UK has closed down. Period. Matched.co.uk has closed down its operations and is no longer accepting any new publishers or will not be making any more payments and advises all publishers registered with them to remove their ads as soon as possible.

This is the formal announcement from their website, emails are also being sent out to publishers:

Last News

20th November 2008

It is with much regret that we announce that Matched.co.uk has closed.

Matched has been running as a beta experiment for some time and, after much careful consideration, it has been decided not to progress the project to the next stage.

As a result, Matched will not be accepting new sign-ups and will no longer be assigning adverts to its current publisher base.

All publishers who completed their latest payment run before November 19th 2008 will still be paid, but please note that no further payments will be made after this. Therefore, we recommend that all publishers remove any Matched ads from their websites.

Thank you very much for being part of the Matched.co.uk experience and we wish you the best of luck for the future success of your websites.

Kind regards,
Matched.co.uk

Love I.T or Hate I.T, You can’t Just Ignore it. Thats the common notion when it comes to Microsoft. Being in the Tech Industry, you get to hear a lot of self proclaimed MS (Microsoft) haters who have no clue about what they are jabbing at. So, I decided to take a Jab at them. I asked a few of them why they hated Microsoft? The answers i got ranged from “Coz they are a big corporation and are we not supposed to hate them” to “I dunno man, everyone hates them, i guess”. Recently, at a seminar in India, I decided to take my curiosity to the next level.  I asked the participants of the seminar to participate in two polls. One, Do you hate Microsoft Operating Systems. Two, Rationalize  Why?

The average time taken to answer the first question was 2 minutes, while answering the second, most people took more than half an hour and a guy even came back,  asking me let him change his answers to Question 1 to “No”. Typically, we all suffer from Herd Mentality. Most of us do not have a clue about MS’s product line. We just hate MS because somebody told us they are evil or because their OS sucks or because its a cool thing to do. Hate MS, Love Apple and you are considered tech savvy. Is that it?

I do not say that MS does not have reasons enough to be hated, But they definitely don’t deserve to be hated by people who have no clue as to why they hate MS. My two cents to all the computer users that hate paying MS for their so called shitty Operating System, To hell with you. Do you think you can handle a flavor of Linux? Or how long since you all start using OSx and start complaining  about Apple!!

What is Crowd Sourcing?, According to Cambrian House:

Crowdsourcing is when people gather via the Internet to create something and share in the profit – often without ever meeting each other in person. The products of these collaborations are referred to as crowdsourced.

Cambrian House is a crowd sourcing community that uses the knowledge of its users to benefit each other in their quest for starting a business. They use a method where Ideas are traded and discussed by actual people who give their opinion, knowledge and skill towards a promising idea. To put it in simple words, people gather to discuss ideas and everyone contributes in their own way to the ideas they support. This was people involved grow and evolve as a community. Cambrian House has won the pick20 web 2.0 awards also for this initiative. Cambrian house has managed to get venture capital fund through vencorps, so if you have an idea worth sharing, logon to www.cambrianhouse.com and register to see if people ‘aye’ or ‘nay’  your ideas.

With the Web2.0 brand fever catching up, more and more websites are sprouting on the internet claiming to be web 2.0 off-shoots. With Open Source powering web2.0 all the way, one shan’t wonder why the keyword caught on pretty easily. With access to creating a web2.0 site made super easy by open source softwares and platforms, thousands, if not millions of the next web2.0 success story claims are floated online everyday. But how far is this true? or how far away is this from the actual truth?

With all this hype and hula about web2.0, the real advantage is set in for the end-user where we get great quality, ease-of-use service at cheap rates. But again, the flip side of the coin tells a different story. The story of the second internet bubble waiting to burst. The real solution to this problem would be to start indexing and rating the web2.0 service providers even as the web2.0 is in its infancy.

Come Holiday season and the average Joe takes his time off work to stretch his legs a bit. But most of his time is spent in fixing this and fixing that, those things that you knew were broken and you have not had the luxury of time to fix it. Of all the fixing and fiddling, the most frustrating experience for you would be calling for computer help or Tech support. Tech Support business booms during the holiday season and tens of thousand of technicians have already been assembled up in India to cater to Tech support calls from U.S, U.K and the rest of the world. Here are few pointers that would help you make a smooth conversation and get your problems fixed quickly.

1. If you are calling a 24 hr support line, the best time to call for help would be around 5AM to 8AM for united states callers of all time zones. This is the time when there are the least number of calls and more number of technicians starting their shift. A tech would be more efficient and eager to help, when you call them at the beginning of the shift.

2. Sometimes, you may have to be on hold for a long time before reaching an actual person who can help you, These times may be really frustrating, but hold out and do not vent out your anger to the person who answers your call. Your problem will be fixed faster if you build a better rapport with the technician

3. The most important factor in getting your problem solved quickly and efficiently is to call the right company.

** If you are having a problem with your computer’s hardware or peripherals like printer,scanner etc, call your computer manufacturer or the peripheral manufacturer.

** If its a problem with your internet, call your Internet Service Provider

** If its an Windows Operating System problem or problems with windows components such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Internet Explorer, WIndows Media Player etc, call Microsoft. You can also alternatively call your computer manufacturer for problems with your operating system, But you may not get the best solution or you may be given a run-around for the right solution.

** If you have a virus or spyware on the computer or a problem with your Antivirus software, call your antivirus vendor or you can call reputed antivirus companies like Symantec or Mcafee and get them to help you fix the problem.

** Apart from the ones mentioned above, you can also call other software companies for problems with their respective software.