Barnes & Noble’s Nook Colour into the Tablet market can be an answer to Amazon’s kindle fire, as felt by analysts. The 7″ nook colored tablet should be closer to kindle fire both in price and functionality. The current nook colored e-reader costs $249 whereas kindle fire is tagged at $199. The nook can clear its way if it can come out at less than $199 and if it can offer more than kindle fire’s features. Amazon is quite successful in targeting average users with its kindle fire.

It is difficult for nook to head on with either Apple or Amazon. As per the words of Lance Strate, Professor at Fordham University, Barnes & Noble is listed in B-category compared to Amazon which fares in A-category. It is speculated that B & N may strike a deal with Microsoft to have a major push in the market. It is also likely that B & N may come with enhanced functionalities to trade better than kindle fire.

The education market has great potential for tablet consumption. A low cost tablet with Wi-Fi is a great boon for students to access and disseminate information from and through various resources. Apple’s strategy aptly fits into this eco system by having established its relations with educational publishers. As of now, it is highly difficult to implement the same strategy by B & N as it has to cross two important barriers. The first one is, it should be able to present a tablet at less than $199 and secondly, it should prove its capability in presentation of feature rich product that can outperform Apple and kindle fire. There is no competition for B & N from Apple as Apple always targets premium segment being well established in the market.

Nook has better storage and memory capacity than kindle fire. Having a higher storage capability will let you possess and manage large volumes of content and having a higher memory capacity will let you experience faster audio and video streaming. You can also switch easily between applications. Another advantage with Nook is, the ability to download and use applications from Android marketplace. Kindle fire can support its own applications only.

The android 2.1 powered nook colored tablet comes with 16 GB of internal storage. The external memory can be extended up to 32 GB. It supports Wi-Fi and microSD. The tablet may pose as a strong bet for entry level android tablets. The nook is not branded for a particular segment of consumers. Hence, it may be captured by a wide range of audience.

There is no doubt that, there is a growing number of tablets sales month after month. However, it appears that these figures are bloated to get the attention of potential customers.

HP’s CEO Meg Whitman said at an event that HP is also considering a possible separate unit for its PC business, eyeing heavily on a spin-off worth around. She stated that the company now requires focusing and working more on its software business making the PC hardware business a separate unit. HP is now moving on to concentrate more on the software and its services. The company, she said though has not yet decided on any pay/job cuts so far, relief for the employees.

HP has already abandoned the mobile maker and the smart phone manufacturer Palm Inc. and its operating system webOS based hardware products, especially its entire computer range as it had been the cause of a very disappointing sales making it even tougher for the then CEO Leo Apotheker (ousted last month from HP). The operating system webOS was running on many HP products like TouchPad tablet and a range of other Smart Phones. It is now moving on to improve its software business with this one big step of buying Autonomy Corporation.

Though there was a rush in all the announcements made by HP about this deal, it only helped HP in the end mounting its stocks to a new high in a very limited amount of time. Meg Whitman went on to address the conference hosted by the Public Policy Institute of California, that the Autonomy acquisition was part of the proceedings earlier made by the then CEO Leo Apotheker. It clearly wants to improve the profits but it all depends on the business approach it is going to follow, analysts predict. The stocks have hit an all time high, with HP buying around 87% of Autonomy shares. The remaining shares are kept open as well. Autonomy will continue to work under Mr. Mike Lynch (Co-founder of Autonomy Corp.) as a separate division of HP.

In the near future, HP will not consider any more large acquisitions and as the CEO suggests, this might be the end of such large takeovers. Till then, we only expect Whitman has a better stay unlike her predecessor, at her newly acquired position as the chief of HP and let us hope Autonomy was the right fit filling the gap to reinvent HP’s software strategy.

The tablet will have a 9 inch screen. It will be supported by Google’s android operating system. It is being said to be manufactured by Quanta computers. The processor will be a power packed dual core OMAP4 with a remarkable speed of 1.5 GHz. The Tablet will have a SSD backing of 16 GBs.  Now, it is true that this is not much. However, with Amazon’s cloud drive, there is a fair chance that the idea will be to encourage users to store their music and data in the cloud and not in your machine. You can also rent your favorite movies and videos from Amazon instant video.

Amazon is all set to launch their Tablets in two versions. One is just with Wi-Fi, while the other comes with a 3G support. The 3G version of the tablet will also have additional support from some telecom partner. The price of the 3G model will also be standardized according to popularity and extra support costs. Amazon intends to launch this as an out and out Tablet. It will have reader apps but it will be much more than that. This speculation is being based on the fact that Amazon has taken steps to invest in customized apps for business and enterprises to be included in the Tablet. Other than that, you can always download your favourite apps from the Amazon Android App store.

Amazon is targeting a production of about 1.5 million Tablets within a very short time frame. This will put it in direct competition with the leader in the Tablet market which is by far the iPad from Apple Inc. Apple gives the support of iTunes to its users who want to download movies, videos, music etc. However, Amazon is already way ahead in this regard since it has a variety of apps, Kindle reader and much such interesting software for users to download and use.

It is true that with Apple’s iPad in the market, most Android tablets have been having a hard time getting their products up front. Apple has always produced specific digital software, tunes and content to market their devices. Amazon is taking a roundabout route by marketing the Kindle Tablet for increased business for its cloud drive, video and app store. However, if Amazon can pull off its Kindle Tablet within a comparable price range of the iPad or maybe even cheaper, it has a shot at ruling the market.

The device is just a simple e-reader, which can read pdf files but not doc files. There is no room for media files either; you cannot listen to mp3 music files. A web browser is also not available. This means that the device is simply designed for ‘reading only’ using which you can read pdf ebooks, magazines and other documents in pdf format. On a comparison with the screen of Kindle, both the screens look just the same because they have the same Pearl e-ink screen. Texts appear pretty much the same on both the screens but Nook has some extra choices of fonts.

Nook has some cool social elements integrated to it via the Nook Friends feature. You can share what you are reading with a list of your friends. You can lend your ebooks (like sharing) to your friends and can also request books to read lendable books from your friends (though the books have to be ‘lendable’ for this feature to work, because that is decided by the publishers). You can also share what you are reading via Twitter and Facebook using the hooks Nook offers; you can also post updates on highlighted passages.

The user interface is very elegant and makes it very comfortable and apt for reading. The device has a built-in dictionary and if you simply tap on a word you can get its definition. There is a little directional/navigation button using which you can navigate through the menus and can also make a selection by pressing the button. The device uses infrared touch technology – there are small infrared sensors around the border of the device which can sense the position of your touch on the screen. Since the sensor is infrared based, you don’t actually have to touch the screen. The sensor can sense your finger just a hair over the screen and the response is clean.

Both, the new Nook the Kindle Wi-Fi come at $139. But there won’t be a ‘Nook with special offers’ at a lower price, so don’t expect that. While Kindle with special offers come at $25 less compared to the new Nook (which is $139). Kindle could beat Nook on this feature since it still prevails as an excellent e-Reader which is appreciated as an easy-to-use device with no touch screen. But if you are laying your hands on a touch screen phone for the whole day, handling Nook won’t be a problem. Nook’s battery life (with Wi-Fi turned off)  is almost double like that of the Kindle Wi-Fi – upto two months.

Well, taking into account of all the features and the price, the new Nook could be a better buy for some while the others could still prefer Kindle. It is all a matter of preference. By the way, the new Nook is open for preorder now and can ship on June 10^th.

The following are a series of tips to keep in mind when you are choosing a web hosting solution:

Amount of Space

Although quality is very important, the amount of space is also essential. The best hosting is one that will provide you with significant space so that your website can be accommodated. There are numerous companies that provide unlimited disk space, unlimited hard disk, and unlimited bandwidth for a price of no more than $10 per month. This is particularly important when the traffic that visits the site increases over time.

FTP Access

The best hosting solution will permit you to have access to your website via FTP with a FTP client application or a FTP manager.

Speed of the Site

The world is quickly becoming increasingly advanced and individuals who visit websites do not want to wait for pages to load. Additionally, search engines will also consider the speed of the site when they are ranking websites. The host should ensure that your site moves as fast as it can and has very little downtime.

Control Panel

Many people do not consider this when they are choosing a web host. However, a good control panel which is web-based will allow users to login as well as check numerous aspects of their site including mail and statistics along with any number of other factors. This is particularly essential for people you are new to being webmasters.

Customer Support

This is particularly important if you are new to running a website. More likely than not, you will eventually run into problems or difficulties with your site that you will need help to fix. If you are unable to troubleshoot the issue yourself, the web hosting company will need to examine the problem and determine the appropriate solution. The best hosting company will be one that will provide you with customer service and support 24 hours a day and will fix the solution within no more than a day of the incident.

Before you sign up for a company, try sending an email or two to the support contact email. See how quickly they answer and how helpful they are. Try to determine their level of technical proficiency as well.

Avoid Companies that Oversell

Although it is tempting to choose a site that provides a large amount of disk space, bandwidth, as well as unlimited domains, this is not always the best choice. This is particularly true when the company attempts to sell these features for a very small price. As is the case with other things, you get what you pay for. So, if it seems like it is too good to be true, it probably is. These companies are often unable to keep up with customer support as well as the quality of their service.

Don’t Underpay

If you want to start and maintain a serious blog or website, you should certainly invest the necessary money to do so with a good hosting option. Although it might not be necessary to possess a dedicated server at the beginning, you should consider this option particularly if you expect or are receiving a lot of traffic to your site.

If you are currently searching for a web host that will fulfill all of your needs, the above are certainly great starting points for choosing the best option.

With Google coming up with its announcement of trying to assist the developers as well as the consumers with better apps with better features in the Android market; this will pep up not only the apps in the Android market, but also the usability for high end users and the developers alike. Google is expected to march ahead of its market expectations to fly past its 200,000 application level to beat the App store this coming year. The industry sources attributed this phenomenon to capturing the market with better applications and also provide recognition to the best developers. This change that Google is seeking is as a result of the number of complaints received from end users and the action being taken by Google is good enough evidence for the same. These changes are expected to be working similar to the Apple’s App Store function on the iPhone.

The latest addition of scroll down options that are being offered by Google makes it easier for customers to locate and use apps. This has led to most of the specifications in a lot of apps to be topping the performance charts in their assigned categories. To give an illustration of the same the Twitter-esque top ‘Trending‘ list is one of the apps that has been downloaded the highest for the past seven days. This pushes any app that has been in the list of highest download for a period of seven days into ‘Top Paid‘ or ‘Top Free‘ lists that counts for the popularity of the app over a 30-day time frame.

Apart from this Google is also offering recognition to its long time developers the chance to display a small icon award by their name. This accounts for rewarding all the years of toil for many of the quality and steady publishers as well. There are about 150 developers that will be graced with this special badge. While there are a lot of debates about offering these badges of recognition to many developers, some of them still feel that this is like offering a seal of approval to the best developers.

Given this situation, there are many apprehensions in the market as to how the handset vendors and carriers can convert the application to suit the requirements in the emerging markets. The ultimate aim of this mission undertaken by Google is enhanced recognition for the developers, better navigation for its consumers and of course last but not the least increase, in the download rate in the market.

Remember one of the most popular pranks on the 1st April 2011 – it is indeed the Gmail Motion prank. Most hilarious it was, and actually one of the smartest and hottest pranks ever. If you are not familiar, let me briefly tell you about the prank. I actually got a Tweet from one of my tweeps about this asking me to try out Gmail in Motion. First, I could not understand and then I thought that it could just be a prank since it was April 1st. But then when I clicked through the link, I was amazed. I could see the notification, a demo video, and even testimonials from people. The site looked all professional and for real and Gmail made be believe for an instant that it was all for real (even better with the word “BETA” on it!). Then I watched the demo video. All hilarious! Kudos to Google for making fun in a very professional manner; very typical of Google indeed.

This news was hot and trending in all social media and people were talking about it all the time for the past three days. Some enjoyed the fun, and some even welcomed the new technology with amaze without realizing that it was just a prank. But you know what? Those people who believed it were not fooled actually! The people at the Institute of Creative Technologies have made this prank real and have demonstrated it. This video below (again it is hilarious, mind you) demonstrates how Gmail prank can be brought to reality using the motion sensing technology. Yes, it is possible to type your emails and send them through your gestures using a Microsoft Kinect device connected to your computer. The technology is named Software Library Optimizing Obligatory Waving (SLOOW, well not literally!) and it basically uses a Microsoft Kinect camera connected to the laptop to control Gmail.

Well the video pretty much demonstrates typing out an email in real. I didn’t believe that the prank has been brought to reality until I saw the demo. The guy indeed typed out an email and sent it. He used the gestures given in the Gmail motion prank page for typing out specific words and taking out specific actions like opening Gmail, composing a message, sending it etc. After typing out the email, using body gestures, he pretended to lick a stamp and stick it on to an imaginary envelope (he stuck it virtually to his thigh) and the mail was sent.

Actually I wouldn’t wave at my laptop and do funny gestures to type out an email when I have my fingers intact. Well, it is all hilarious and stupid (sorry about the language) but I think that we *must* embrace the technology. The technology is really catching and could have promising applications in the very near future. Whether it would be really useful or not, this is something great to experience. If we could really master the shortcuts to most commonly used words, we could be writing emails just as we would talk to someone, with appropriate body language.

Everything is fine. But there seems to be a big issue. Ping is not available everywhere. Their service is available only in 23 countries, 23 being a small number. Given that Last.FM and MySpace are available in most countries in the world, this is really a setback. Apple seems to do this because it wants to tie Ping closely to the music store.

Let me tell you how two awesome features of Ping will suffer because of this constraint -

1. Ping has a cool option to buy a song directly from a status update. What will be the use of this cool social feature if Ping is not available in my country? See how disappointed I will be when I click my friend’s update to buy a song to see the message that the service is unavailable in my country?

2. Another awesome feature of Ping is browse popular or trending music albums/songs and then buy them. Again, this feature will not serve the purpose if the service is unavailable for specific countries.

Given this, many people feel that they’d rather stick with Last.FM or MySpace instead of going for a service that has not many features available at their country. We all know that Facebook tops social networking media and if it decides to offer music, it sure can draw the whole world towards itself. That would be an easy game, but Facebook should really take the initiative, is a question which Mark Zuckerberg should think.

Apple acquired Lala, an online music service, for implementing social capability with music. Lala is a standalone company which used the social sharing and have succeeded driving peeps towards paid music downloads. Leaving this drawback aside, Apple’s fans boast that this is Apple’s first attempt at combining social networking and music store. They hope that Apple will surely improve after hearing feedback from its customers. They say, “Facebook has had years to perfect its model and to work its way into most countries around the world. That capability, success and popularity didn’t happen overnight“.

There is as usual a combination of voices; some appreciate the launch and some say it sucks. It could be Apple’s ingenious marketing strategy to make people wait for something when they are increasing craze among the crowd for a particular service. Let’s see how people will embrace this release of Apple. After all, the social component with, will guarantee increased sales.

“We love open source; We have worked with open source for a long time now” says Jean Paoli of Microsoft in a recent interview with Network World.

The mistake of equating all open source technology with Linux was “really very early on“, Paoli says. “That was really a long time ago“, he says. Further, he adds – “We understand our mistake“.

You realize one mistake and you dive head long into yet another by banning apps involving any open source licensing from its Windows Phone Marketplace.  Section 5.e of the Microsoft Application Provider Agreement reads as - The Application must not include software, documentation, or other materials that, in whole or in part, are governed by or subject to an Excluded License, or that would otherwise cause the Application to be subject to the terms of an Excluded License.

‘Excluded License’ incorporates the GPLv3, LGPLv3, Affero GPLv3 license and equivalents, or pretty much “any license that requires redistribution at no charge,” as open source evangelist Jan Wildeboer pointed out in February.

This clause will hamper Microsoft’s reputation with the free and open source developers. This ban means Windows phone platform will lose out on great apps like VLC, just like Apple did, with its parsimonious control over its Apps Store.

Apple and Microsoft do not have means to make source code for applications directly available. They also have a DRM lock which prevents the binary being passed onto another user, on all applications. Developers work around this handicap by making the software available under a dual license, GPL and proprietary.

Microsoft has not been an instant hit in the mobile arena, and hence has partnered with Nokia to achieve greater success. This might raise the product’s marketability, but the quality will be tested by its users, and that possibility seems grim now. Excluding open source applications cannot be seen as a smart move for Microsoft, especially when launching a new product.

Rather than being fastidious about what to include or not, it should focus on inclusivity and adjustment, so as to compete with the enormous success of the Android.  Interoperability among many technologies, which often involves integration with open source software, is what customers are demanding.

Microsoft has a “shared responsibility”, and not one single Head, of overseeing open source initiatives, which is a major reason for the setbacks. In an era when Microsoft is no longer the world’s most important tech company – that title, calculated by stock performance, is now held by Apple; Steve Ballmer can’t afford to ignore a market force as large as the one posed by open source.

Instead of just getting the Google Suggest when you type in, you start getting search results which keep changing as you keep typing in your search query. It seems like a fast way to search, not to mention, the increase in adviews for Google, because even the ads change as you keep typing. Does it look like an irritating feature? Sites like LifeHacker has already given out instructions on how to disable it.

According to their blog post, here’s what Google says are the key features Google Instant.

• Dynamic Results – Google dynamically displays relevant search results as you type so you can quickly interact and click through to the web content you need.
• Predictions – One of the key technologies in Google Instant is that we predict the rest of your query (in light gray text) before you finish typing. See what you need? Stop typing, look down and find what you’re looking for.
• Scroll to search – Scroll through predictions and see results instantly for each as you arrow down.

Don’t rush to check this out just as yet, they’re in the process of rolling this out and initially only signed in users from France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and the U.K. using Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE 8 will see this new feature. For the unfortunate others like us, we get to watch videos like the one below to see how the search of the future will be.

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• How to Turn Off Google Instant Search [Google] (lifehacker.com)
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Now how about a script which detects if the phone is in your pocket and automatically turn on the vibrate mode? I found someone who wrote up a Python script which does this for the N900 here – http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=44484

I’ve just begun exploring this phone in my free time, but it’s a great phone if you’re looking for a customizable phone and you do know Python or some Linux programming.

I’ve always wanted to know how the various opensource search engines performed when running head to head with each other. I’ve personally not had the time nor patience to setup such a benchmark. Luckily Vik Singh has done just that and blogged the results of the benchmark.

He’s benchmarked the latest versions of Lucene, sqlite, Xapian, zettair and sphinx while indexing twitter messages (968,937 tweets to be exact) and Medical data sets. I was not too surprised when Lucene came up as a winner from these benchmarks

Read the Blog post by Vik to get the details of the benchmarks.

What I liked about the design was the 30 degree tilt of the screen when the QWERTY keypad slides open. This allows the user to interact with the keyboard and the touch-screen at the same time. The tilt also allows the user to hold the phone with just the index finger – pretty comfortable – unlike the slide out of the E75.

One snippet which kind of surprised me in the presentation is that Axel mentioned that there  more than 1 billion users of Nokia phones. This particular model is targeted to users who are looking at having a personal experience with their mobiles – targeted towards people who share photos, videos, microblog, are active on social network and need a phone which doubles up as a personal computer on the go. During the Q&A session, one of the bloggers did ask about the high price of this model (expected to be around Rs. 35,000 during the launch). Axel answered that this mobile is meant for people who are looking a niche phone which provides the full online and social experience  the N97 provides.

After the presentations, I got to play around with the N97 for sometime – pics of the phone are at the end of this post.

Some of the points which caught my attention about the N97 are:

• A whopping 32GB of internal memory – which can be expanded to a maximum of 48GB. This is great for carrying around your media and there’s no need of another media player
• 16:9 screen ratio – perfect for viewing widescreen movies on the go – this unit’s got a TV out so you can project the movies on your phone on the big screen.
• A FM transmitter – to listen to your music on the car radio without the need of extra cables to hook it on.
• Home Screen Widgets – this allows you to have a pieces of the Internet on your home screen.
• The QWERTY keyboard had a good feel to it. Even though the keys on the N97 are smaller than the E75′s, they layout seems to just feel better laid out on the N97.
• The touchscreen also seems to perform better than the 5800′s.
• The phone comes bundled with the Facebook application, apart from other Social Media application like Hi5 and Qik. So you don’t have to hunt for these apps once you get your phone.
• The tilt of the screen when the keypad is open is a very useful feature allowing the user to place the phone on a table while typing out messages and emails, taking calls or surfing the web.

Thanks to Nokia India and Songita B. Verma & team for getting this event organized! It was great having to hear direct from the Design Team on the rationale behind the various features which are packed in the N-Series phones.

Learn more about the Nokia N97:
The Nokia N97 Datasheet
Nokia NSeries Background
Nokia N97′s product page

Some of the Pictures from the Event:

The N97 Presentation

Home Screen Widgets

Axel Meyer during his presentation

Q&A Session

First look at the N97

Trying out the Handwriting Recognition

30 Degrees Tilt of the Screen when the keypad's open

More pictures from the event are available on Flickr.

Here’s a real interesting article on how Facebook’s handling their photo storage system by creating their own storage system called HayStack.

This week Facebook will complete its roll-out of a new photo storage system designed to reduce the social network’s reliance on expensive proprietary solutions from NetApp and Akamai. The new large blob storage system, named Haystack, is a custom-built file system solution for the over 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month. Jason Sobel, a former NetApp engineer, led Facebook’s effort to design a more cost-effective and high-performance storage system for their unique needs.

Read the article at:  Facebook’s photo storage rewrite.

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Been busy in my spare time for the past few weeks playing on N-Gage. One game I got a hold of is One. The first thing which amazed me was the graphics this game was belting out on a N81 – some of the best graphics I’ve seen on a mobile game!

There are various gameplay options for One – you can play out the story mode, Versus, Survival and Multiplayer.There’s also a training mode which takes you through the various moves in the game. I would advise you to go though the training mode first, there are quite a few moves you’ll miss out on if you don’t. The keys combination are pretty easy to remember – but in the heat of a combat, you’re sure to fumble on which moves to use !

You can customize your player with various hairstyles, gear and fighting styles. You keep unlocking new gear to wear as you keep progressing in the story mode.

The story mode allows you play out the story of the One. In this mode you have to keep fighting opponents to progress in the game – each level has it’s Boss whom you’ll have to defeat to move on to the next level. While you progress through the game, it gets auto-saved only after a few fights- this behavior can be a pain at times. I would have been better if it auto-saved after every fight. Also keep an eye on your rank – every win increases your ranking – beware that ever loss also brings it down!

You can practise your skills in the Versus and Survival mode where you can choose the scenery and the computer player you would like to play against. Practise makes perfect, so hone in your skills in these modes if you find that you’re loosing too much in the story mode. Remember to set the “Ranked” option to “No” in these modes if you don’t want your Ranking to dip while practising your moves.

One piece of advice while playing this game is to keep mixing your moves – if you play the same moves, the computer player usually ends up blocking or countering you. So practice all your different moves and unleash hell for your opponents.

The multiplayer mode works with bluetooth. I couldn’t get anyone else who had One in the same room to go head to head. It would have been better if this was an internet multi-player option instead of just bluetooth.

This game is overall a good buy and will keep you occupied for quite some time if you are into martial art games. Take a break while gaming – I’ve had a bad case of cramps on my fingers after an hour or so of intense gaming.

More about One at the N-Gage Site

Cloud Computing
Image via Wikipedia

Here’s an interesting Article I came across today which goes through the basics of setting up Scalr.  Scalr is  is an open source, fully redundant, self-curing, and self-scaling hosting environment that uses Amazon EC2

This article discusses the implementation of Scalr. Scalr allows network administrators to create virtual server farms, using prebuilt components. Scalr uses four Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs) for load balancing, databases, application server, and a generic base image. Administrators can preconfigure one machine and, when the load warrants, bring online additional machines with the same image, to handle the increased requests.

By using Scalr, you can create a server farm that uses prebuilt AMIs for load balancing, web servers, and databases. You also can customize a generic AMI, which you can use to host your actual application.

Scalr monitors the health of the entire server farm, ensuring that instances stay running and that load averages stay below a configurable threshold. If an instance crashes, another one of the proper type will be launched and added to the load balancer.

Link to Article: Auto-Scaling Web Sites Using Amazon EC2 and Scalr