Category: Tech and Culture

I have been at the neighborhood Super Walmart store quite a few times over the last couple of months. Company policies notwithstanding, I always enjoy shopping at that store. Contrary to popular “anecdotes”, I have always had great customer service, and at times, the sales staff has even helped me pick out colors of bed sheets, and assisted in transporting big electronic stuff in my car.

Everyone remembers the huge brouhaha over Walmart’s extremely tight RFID rollout deadline to its suppliers. Well, it looks like Walmart is already starting to use RFID tags on almost everything it sells. There are new signs at various locations inside every store reminding the shopper that Walmart uses advanced technologies to monitor their storeshelves and inventory.

I found this collection of pictures of a Walmart store with the RDIF tags on various electronic products. This is amazing. Talk about instant notification to the store inventory frontend whenever a big item on the shelves is purchased by a shopper. Examples are furniture, mattresses, etc.

Link – http://www.spychips.com/protest/walmart/spychip-slideshow/pages/can-you-spot-the-hp-spychip.html

It will always be remembered for the inovation it so succinctly fueled.

Links:

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/os/warp/withdrawal.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2

I happened to go to the local Best Buy only to discover dozens of people camping out in the cold weather outside the store. I thought that Black Friday was long gone, and there had to be a good reason for the gala. Turned out that there was a rumor that Best Buy stores were getting an undisclosed shipment of Xbox 360s at midnight. Some fanatics did not want to lose the opportunity to get the Christmas gift of the season, and so decided to camp out all night to get hands on one as soon as the store opened in the morning. Of course, some people were camping out just so they could re-sell the console at a profit margin of more than $300.

Deliberate or not, this Xbox 360 shortage has me puzzled. Why would Microsoft do something like this, especially in the busy Christmas shopping season? They said their plan was to sell a million units within 90 days of the launch. Are they near that objective?

I will get a new generation gaming console myself one of these days.

While I sat on my chair looking at my first greatly successful website, I realized that getting visitors to my site was a bigger challenge then (late 90s) than it is now. The only formula was to get a successful listing in the Yahoo! Directory. It is no joke, Yahoo! was the best way to get traffic to your site in those days. I remember rejoicing when my website was finally listed in Yahoo! (It still remains listed to this day)

Banner exchange programs were another way to expose your website to the masses. The idea was to put up a huge graphical banner on top of your main webpage to advertise other websites. These banners were mostly animated. In return of advertising other websites, you got your own banner advertised on someone else’s website. The idea was simple, and over 200,000 websites in that time actually subscribed to one or the other banner exchange services.

One of the biggest such services was LinkExchange, which was eventually bought by Microsoft in 1998 for $250 million in stock. It seemed like a smart move for Microsoft at the time considering that they really wanted to develop an Internet business strategy. Something that they did not have until Balmer literally yelled at Gates for. Of course, LinkExchange was fairly profitable at that time, and had a user base of about a quarter of a million websites, both professional and not so professional.

Everyone likes to increase their website’s traffic, but no one likes “scandalous” third party banners on their webpages. What if a banner supporting the Linux SANs crops up on your webpage about the Windows Server family? People wanted an easier way to market their websites cheaply, and in a targetted manner. This is when Google launched a search engine, and some time later, their Adsense/AdWords service.

AdSense does not display any annoying big-sized banners on top of your webpage, and you can customize the ads in any way you wish. The end goal still remains at bringing more surfers to your webpage. Only, this time you don’t exchange ads. Rather, you get paid for publishing third party ads on your site. So, how do you increase viewership? You just invest a little in the AdWords program and get ads posted on publishers’ websites. Not everyone wants increased viewership. Some display ads just to make money off their websites. The scheme makes perfect sense, and isn’t annoying for either the publisher or the advertiser. Everyone goes home happy!

If only Microsoft hadn’t given up on the golden opportunity to revolutionize online advertising at a time when the Internet was growing at the rate of 100% every 2-3 months, they would have been a far more happier bunch. It is strange how the world’s best software company couldn’t come up first with a more user-friendly service.

Reading the news on Yahoo! News in the morning today, I saw an ad for Yahoo! VideoGames, and clicked on it, only to discover a very good looking and comprehensive site about videogames. It was much more organized and eye-friendly than Gamespot, and covered all the consoles, handhelds, and PC configurations. Yahoo! even has its own video game reviews/discussion show called “Reset”.

This made me wonder. Is Yahoo! the next big media company? They have been in the Internet business ever since it took birth, and have invented a lot of the stuff/ideas we have come to live with. The Internet is a carrier of voice calls, videos, music, and gradually even television today. Where is Yahoo! in all this?

Well,

1. Yahoo! owns Dialpad, a VoIP telephony provider. It plans to include dialpad technology into Yahoo! Messenger to provide global calling plans for only a couple cents a minute.

2. Yahoo! owns Launch/Yahoo! Music, one of the fastest growing music subscription services.

3. Yahoo! acquired broadcast.com in 1999, aiming to target corporate marketers, and financial analysis media outlets.

4. Yahoo! provides exclusive live audio/video webcasts of college sports on a paid subscription basis.

5. Yahoo! provides a suit of comprehensive domain registration, hosting, and small business solutions.

Finally, Yahoo! has some of the best software developers on their payroll, which distinguishes them from rival Google, which hasn’t come out with one good client based software other than Google Earth. Yahoo! has consistently been bringing good software (Music, messenger, Maps API, etc.) to the end-users.

Another thing seems to be Yahoo!’s emphasis on basing their technology/products on actual user experience. They believe in a more human managed approach to bringing the best of the web to users (del.icio.us, Flickr, MyWeb2; all of which are based on tagging).

Not all their acquisitions have worked in their favor though, and they have actually been known to make a lot of their acquisitions non user-friendly in the past (egroups, flickr, etc.), but they are changing it for the better. Also, most of their new services (Yahoo! Answers, Maps Beta) are a step above what the nearest competitor provides.

Truly interesting times indeed…and the best part is that I see very little hype in Yahoo!’s efforts.

I installed Google Local for Mobiles on my Sony Ericsson S710a a couple days ago. The best part about this service is that it is a 100kb Java program that actually installs in your cellphone. This means that you don’t need to use the browser or type in any obscure URLs when you need to find the nearest Indian restaurant!

It is noteworthy that this service is completely free of cost, unlike the $4 a month that Mapquest charges for a similar service. You can also look at satellite pictures of your destination or the route much like the full-blown Google Maps service.

Personally, this service doesn’t have much appeal to me other than helping find the phone numbers of various businesses while on the road. I am quite content with my Garmin StreetPilot C330 GPS device. Although the StreetPilot has millions of points of interest on its hard drive, replete with phone numbers, there are instances when I am unable to find the restaurant of my choice or a working phone number. This is when the Google service on my cellphone would help me. It is faster than using Google.com, and I can easily connect to the business by clicking on the contact number directly from within the software!

I tried it tonight, and was impressed by the fact that it stores recently searched addresses and locations for future use. One thing I would like to see is more phones with GPS technology built in so that you do not have to input your current location manually!

Lawyers love patents. Engineers crave patents. Businessmen have mixed feelings. Visionaries hate them.

Patents are an amazing concept. They give a new meaning to ideas and their conceptualization and ownership. I think the American intellectual property preservation/regulatory system is the mainstay of its hitherto tremendous technological lead, as well as the entrepreneurial spirit at the academic as well as corporate level.

Software patents have always been the cause of huge debates. Almost no academic personality likes them. Open source developers disdain them wholeheartedly, citing innovation stagnation as a reason to not enforce them. From a theoretical point of view, software patents do not make much sense. Software is an idea expressed in a language. As such, it is more of a literary work than a process. At the same time, it is not entirely a piece of literary work as software more often than not helps achieve something. It is a means to an end to some real life problem. As such, software patents fall under a gray area, and some descretion is to be observed when enforcing patent rules.

For example, I think it is very logical to patent an encryption algorithm because an algorithm is actually a process. It is unique, and actually is an innovation that has the potential to change the computing/tech world for years to come. On the other hand, patents like that protecting the “innovation” of one click purchasing are pretty darn stupid…in my opinion. Are we actually celebrating innovation by granting such patents?

I came across this great webpage at MIT discussing the good and the bad about software patents. It is surprising what kind of ideas are being patented as software innovations in the present times. This is some sort of reverse evolution.

At the same time, I feel that we need to congratulate companies like Microsoft and IBM that actually use their patent portfolios to fortify their innovative endeavors rather than stymie creativity by others. For personal developers and open source projects, these big “patentors” hardly pose any roadblocks.

Patents are the artillery of big companies. That is the only way they can mark boundaries in this extremely volatile industry. In a way, software patents also help overall innovation in the form of diverse products from different companies. Patent attorneys remain happy, too.

I just hope that some sort of system is developed that inhibits false/stupid/ridiculous patents from being considered, much less filed.

Just came across this gem of a piece on the Internet. It appears that BellSouth, one of the biggest ISPs in North America, is now looking at increasing its revenue by forging deals with web companies that would allow the latter to pay a premium to get increased throughput/QoS on BellSouth’s network. The article has done a good job of non-objectively citing the bad effects of such a paradigm move.

I have mixed feelings about this proposal. On the outset, it sounds rather unnecessary to me. Why would a large scale network operator bother about such a deal when they could just as well deploy a high speed IP network that essentially guarantees unlimited bandwidth to every user and/or service. We all know that where there is bandwidth, there are users, so it seems naturally plausible that BellSouth wouldn’t be spending a lot of money on deploying a network that would only have optimal utilization during the peak times. Not to mention that hardware costs have fallen down drastically over the last 5 years.

We all know how the ATM networks fared. I am not going to get into a debate here, but it would suffice to say that ATM was a “dreamy” technology that never actually found its niche, except in low bandwidth ADSL networks. The telcos realized long ago that trying to mould voice capabilities into IP networks was a better strategy than vice versa, not to mention that the ATM networks still needed a bridge to other non-ATM networks in the form of a protocol, which is IP. ATM proponents couldn’t win their case for higher QoS to certain types of traffic in the face of better network management using a conventional network protocol like IP on typical packet networks.

Why then are the same telcos trying to FORCE a tiered service mechanism on an already capable and extendable technology? I think the true motivation is increased revenue potential from growing Internet media companies that are willing to spend any amount of capital to procure readers (contributors) to their websites. But then another question pops in my mind. How much of a throughput boost would a website really need to make me visit it more frequently than its rival? Clearly, even on current “equal opportunity” networks, it appears that we have identical performance from nearly every website.

Thus, it is clear that the main beneficiaries of such a model would be companies that provide packet latency-sensitive services like gaming, media streaming, or delay-sensitive communications. The example of Google.com loading slower than some other company’s website is hence uninformed, unless the provider actually does something to degrade Google’s throughput to the former’s subscribers. This would be shady on so many levels I can only imagine the lawsuits.

In essence, BellSouth wants to earn some kind of royalty from “Internet media companies” in lieu of carrying their “signals” over the network. Much like traditional pay-per-view on TV. Does this signify the gradual acceptance of the Internet as an evolved form of the conventional media outlets? I can see this being the trend, with more and more people looking at blogs for news and opinions, and also using the Internet to set up an interactive communication envelope around their lives. I have been foreseeing this interactive world for quite some time now, and now it seems entirely easily possible.

This brings me to the point where I wonder if it’s really right to question an ISPs decision to earn increased revenue in this manner. Personally, I feel there is no problem as long as the independant and “democratic” aspect of my Internet experience remains the same.