Running Commentary

This was 10th anniversary of Sun Tech Days and expectations were running understandably very high. Having attended the event last year, I was expecting higher standards both in content as well as event organization. HICC's 5000 capacity hall is huge and I still remember the last year's keynote which had entire hall packed and still people were standing. But this year the keynote took place in only Hall 3 and 4 combined (entire hall is composed of 4 halls), which is nearly 60% of the entire hall. Was the attendance this low this year? Address by Sun India CTO Divyeshwar Shah was ok, but it was Rich Green, EVP Sun Microsystems, whom everyone was waiting for. And was the person on stage really Rich Green I have heard about? This person seemed to be some marketing guy from Sun Microsystems who showed marketing slides about almost ALL Sun products! What a yawn! Technology demos were tiresome, stale and unimpressive! Snow and rain effects on Solaris desktop and creating an applicatio...

I admit that my most popular blog is not that popular, but that doesn't mean that I will tolerate any body messing up with it! Have a look at this: http://removing.blogspot.com If you are reading this blog in Firefox, you won't notice a thing (except my posts ofcourse!) but if you are on IE, you will see something like this: These 'comments' have been inserted by blogger when I draft the post, and since these are comments they should not be displayed. Right? Wrong, if I am using IE! What is it? Why is it? When will it be over?

When Steve Ballmer said pompously (yeah, that was downright pompous!) 'We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win the Web.', everyone thought this is version 2.0 of Bill Gates's infamous outburst against Google and its founders. But fed on the Windows and Office dollars, Microsoft actually seems to be pushing towards being a VERY significant player in web domain, if not the winner. Talking in terms of web-search pie, Microsoft's Live Search is still distant 3rd behind Google and Yahoo, but consider this: While Google Search grew by 44% YoY iin terams of search volume and Yahoo managed only 20%, Live Search leapt by 77%. MS is also in fierce competition with Google in race of acquiring nice search providers (like MedStory ,a medical provider) And to Microsoft's credit, Live Search has also begun impressing cynics and critics. Though they had to tone down their radically new search interface, they stil...

Everyone has got a story of how their long forgotten friend from school/college/ last-to-last-to-last-to-last company met them on Orkut after so many years! And undoubtedly Indians are a sizable community on Orkut. But is Orkut taking shape of another MySpace which has already turned into a ready-to-use database of information for cyber crimes? How to keep safe on Orkut? Follow these simple guidelines! Don't make your profile a goldmine for spammers and scamsters! Guys, guys, guys! When will you understand that keeping your mobile number as part of your Name won't lead to more girls calling you? Neither your email-id help in getting you more friend requests! The only people who will love to have your contact information are spammers and telecallers. So give your mobile numbers and email ids in your profile and you can expect more spam in your mail box and more useless calls on your phone. This is just the tip of iceburg. Imagine other nasty uses of email-id and phone number and...

Being in a product development company, I can very well understand the emotions and fears developers undergo when their company goes ahead and buys out their biggest competitor which overshadows the product these guys were working on! So in this sense, Yahoo Photos developers must be bit relaxed now, that Yahoo has finally decided to lay it to rest. Yahoo has decided to march ahead in photo management arena with Flickr which it bought long back and which it has been trying to position in photo management as well as community networking segments. Flickr had generated a lot of buzzword and gained a lot many eyeballs as soon as it was launched, with its theme of 'sharing' and extensive use of tagging concept. Somehow Yahoo Photos had started losing steam and even its albums though lot more intuitive and familiar seemed outdated as compared to Flickr tags! But now I am speculating about the future of Google Videos. Now that Big G has in its kitty the Big Y (YouTube, YouMoron!), doe...

Doomsayers have had their field day! Viacom has filed a 1bn$ lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company Google for copyright infringement and also wants YouTube to be prohibited from hosting anyother video of theirs. Blogdom is buzzing with experts analyzing this news and almost everybody is anticipating more lawsuits coming Google's way. Larry Dignan calls it nearing of 'YouTube's end game' and Donna Bogatin goes to extent of calling Google as 'Internet Bubble 2.0' I feel Donna might have gone too far with that statement but the fact remains that atleast one of the fears of Larry Page and Sergey Brin about making Google a public company has indeed proved to be true. Google has become a behemoth and that makes it much more enviable and much more susceptible to scrutiny and scathing rival attacks. People are suing Google left, right and centre over any issue they can find. So if AFP and Belgian Newspapers have to sue Google News for showing their news (which...

The first two days of Sun Tech Days India have already finished. It is Netbeans and Open Solaris day on 3rd and final day, that is today! Pics For those who don't know, Sun Tech Days is a worldwide Java developers' conference organized by Sun Microsystems and its India leg 2007 was held in Hyderabad and really had people coming from far and wide. It is being held in Hyderabad International Convention Center, Hyderabad and thousands have attended it. There have been keynote sessions from Sun, Oracle and VMWare. I attended only one keynote from Oracle, which was grandiously titled, 'Next Generation platform'. Oracle flaunts the fact that it's products follow all the open standards and that many of its products and standards support or leverage the open source. Continuing on the same lines, this keynote proposed integration of JavaEE 5 (EJB 3.0 specially) , SOA 2.0 and Web 2.0 to develop a new generation application development platform. And what can be better than be...