Friday, October 22, 2010

Google Music

screenshot_01

 

Well Google has come up with new service for Google India. http://www.google.co.in/music. This was a great movie although it supports only hindi songs. Music and phones is a big market in India. The similar service is provided by local search engines http://music.guruji.com/. Bing already launched similar service in US- http://www.bing.com/music.Similarly a lot of features of Bing, you can unlock by changing your Country Settings to US. I don’t understand, what is stopping Microsoft to invest and make these things available in Local regions like India. Google can very much ‘copy’ from Bing and provide similar experience across Local regions as well as US.The problem with this is, in Local market, this resonates with what people want. This makes the entry of Bing even more difficult in future with people’s perception  that it’s copying from Google. I am sure if it is advisable to be followers all the time especially w.r.t emerging markets?

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Translate wiki pages to your own language!

 

Microsoft Research launched a beta version of “WikiBhasha” – a tool that helps users create multilingual content on Wikipedia. The WikiBhasha tool enables contributors to Wikipedia to find content from other Wikipedia articles, translate the content into other languages, and then either compose new articles or enhance existing articles in multilingual Wikipedias. You neither need to be a subject matter expert to contribute, nor need to be familiar with the Wikipedia format. The beta version of WikiBhasha will enable easy content creation in non-English Wikipedias by leveraging the large volume of English Wikipedia content as the source of information. It current takes english as the source language and supports all of the target languages offered by Microsoft’s free Machine Translation system.

 

You can find more information from WikiBhasha.. To see how it works see the video below..

 

WikiBhasha

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Indian Military Organization To Develop Its Own OS

Some headlines are filled with irony, such as these
 

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/India-to-develop-its-own-futuristic-computer-operating-system/articleshow/6719490.cms

 

DRDO makes proposal to develop its own operating system. Sounds Amazing..50 people are going to create a new OS under guidance of DRDO and they think that keeping source code secret will keep their data safe. I would like to see DRDO beat the security levels, Microsoft takes 2K best engineers to create just a new version of an existing OS. Microsoft releases security patches every 2nd Tuesday of every alternative months. NASA does have it's own OS, but even those are hacked regularly. Hackers just need http response to know what the OS is doing and hack it. Country specific issues can pertain to security or maybe some features which are very very limited. All I could think of is it will be Real Time Operating system with windows software, source code and proprietary architecture.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Prizes : Book Review

1241048

Its been long since I read a book, So I am determined to get back to my reading habit. Which other author I could think of, Erich Segal this time disappointed me, not much but a little. Though this novel is not upto the level of other novels by erich segal, I still enjoyed reading. This book is about the Nobel Prize and follows the process and the lives of mainly three characters.

 

THREE EXTRAORDINARY LIVES,
THREE EXTRAORDINARY STORIES....

 

Adam Coopersmith, Sandy Raven and Isabel De Costa ,with these three characters in the centre erich segal paints a powerful and moving saga where they compete for the ultimate glory: the Nobel prize.  It projects scientists exactly the way they are – who dedicated their lives to the cure of one disease, given up most of the pleasures of social lives to solitude of their labs. They go through affairs, marriages, divorces and childbirths - but live their life for only one dream – science !

 

There are some important quotes as well..

 

‘Behind every Nobel prize, there is a saga – of betrayal, sacrifice and hard work’.

‘Aim for the stars. If anyone can do this, only you can !!’

 

Read this book if you have no other master piece to read. Not such a bad book, but not stuffy or overwhelming.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Microsoft releases Windows Phone 7

Windows Phone 7 launces with 9 different models. Windows Phone 7 is not just like another smart phone. It’s smartly designed to surface information right to your fingertips through Live Tiles and brings together all the things you care about most with all the Microsoft Innovative hubs. This is a product that showcases all Microsoft assets across Windows, Windows Live, Bing, Zune, Xbox Live, Office, SharePoint, and Exchange. Windows Phone 7 launches in a variety of styles from Samsung, LG, HTC, and Dell as shown below on networks including AT&T, Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone, and more.
Take a look at this video to experience the Xbox gaming on Windows Phone 7 . There would be a blockbuster portfolio of over 50 game titles that would be available on Windows Phone 7.



The much waited Copy & Paste feature will be available in early 2011! Its time for a phone to save us from our phones. Get ready for windows phone 7.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Google developing self driving car

Google is developing autonomous self driving car.

 

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/09/google-car/

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/personal-tech/computing/Google-developing-self-driving-car/articleshow/6727837.cms

 

Not sure how far is it going to work, especially in countries like India. There were many attempts made and some of them are successful partially to a certain extent. There are many automotive companies working on driver assistance for a long time and they are well integrated into the design process of the car manufacturers, i.e. they build a box that fits into an existing car. They might have proved on well mannered roads like in US but that too with not 100% accuracy. This may take a while may be a decade or more than that because, Its not easy to get rid of existing cars and move to autonomous cars, For many, driving is a passion and they can just away to computers. Though computers may have faster reaction time, they don’t drink, they look all around, etc.. but they certainly will not understand humans. They will not understand how humans drive, especially on roads like Hyd. The best place to test the car is Bangalore where you find dead end on almost all lane and surprise one way traffic which changes every hour. Even a god cannot predict and drive the car safely there, forget about Artificial Intelligence the real intelligence does not work.

 

The only way is to have automated only cars and roads suitable to them, but that might be quite a challenge to the first set of cars. Unless there is a mass production of cars and every one moves to automated self driving cars, it not going to be so easy. It will be very interesting  to see if Google can make any progress.