Ning is Cool!

Ning is Cool, but ... has some bugs.

They have made an excellent UI, fully features, perhaps too much for a starter, but great set of features. Sigining up is easy, setting up a social network is easy. I setup one myself (http://rocknmetal.ning.com/). Ning did go down for several hours yesterday, so I have interrupted while I was entering data. Ning remembered my settings :-)

I got a couple of errors when I tested it with FF 2.0.0.2 today:
on page http://rocknmetal.ning.com/main/admin/appProfile
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /apps/9/04D/04F/socialnetworkmain/widgets/index/controllers/AdminController.php on line 72

I logged in to change my network settings in FF, and got a somewhat weird screen, with text overlapping ads. I have posted this screen here (I have blurred part of the text). Also on FF, there was no submit button at the end of the settings page, so I shifted to IE7.

One suggestion to Ning team will be to go little slow on placing Ads; give the site some time to let networks do contextual analysis on the page.

Google Apps - finally ...

Reported on Slashdot:

"Google Apps is adding a premium offering: a custom 10-GB Gmail box, Google Calendar, GTalk instant messenger, Writely, Google Pages, Google Custom home page iGoogle and Google SpreadSheets for $50 a year per employee. The NYTimes provides some details on competitive pricing: 'By comparison, businesses pay on average about $225 a person annually for Office and Exchange,... in addition to the costs of in-house management, customer support and hardware.

Also on TechCrunch:

Beyond competition and concerns, tonight is a good time to recognize the incredible force of innovation that Google is as well. Its nearly full-service suite of sophisticated, integrated online services is something of historic proportion. Google’s technological brilliance is only beginning to be recognized. What do I mean by that? I mean that with its powerful algorithms to analyze and contextualize information, combined with its growing catalogue of information to analyze - Google is an epoch defining company. Send the world’s business communication through Google and the machine gets a whole lot smarter.

Top 10 Largest Databases in the World

Very interesting list "Top 10 Largest Databases in the World":

8. Amazon

By the Numbers
* 59 million active customers
* More than 42 terabytes of data

7. YouTube

By the Numbers
* 100 million videos watched per day
* 65,000 videos added each day
* 60% of all videos watched online
* At least 45 terabytes of videos

5. Sprint

By the Numbers
* 2.85 trillion database rows.
* 365 million call detail records processed per day
* At peak, 70,000 call detail record insertions per second

4. Google

Although there is not much known about the true size of Google's database (Google keeps their information locked away in a vault that would put Fort Knox to shame), there is much known about the amount of and types of information Google collects.

By the Numbers
* 91 million searches per day
* accounts for 50% of all internet searches
* Virtual profiles of countless number of users

3. AT&T

By the Numbers
* 323 terabytes of information
* 1.9 trillion phone call records

1. World Data Centre for Climate

By the Numbers
* 220 terabytes of web data
* 6 petabytes of additional data


Read full report at:
http://www.businessintelligencelowdown.com/2007/02/top_10_largest_.html

Apple the next Microsoft?

VE3OGG writes on Slashdot

"Apple, the penultimate source of cool. The marketers of slick. The next 'evil empire'? While it might sound goofy at first, Rolling Stone magazine is running an article that summarizes some very interesting points that detail how Apple could become the next technology bad guy. Among the reasons given: Apple's call to be rid of DRM (while continuing to use it in iTunes); Apple's perceived arrogance when they warned consumers not to upgrade to Vista, while not rushing to fix the problem themselves; and Apple's seemingly unstoppable market dominance in the form of the iPod. The iPhone featured heavily as well, a product that is months from release but steals the press from more competitive products. What do you think, could Apple eventually take the place of Microsoft?"

I don't think this is true. Apple is doing this right things, and while doing the right things some times you put off other people. The 'iPhone' marketing technique is very common, while it keeps a lot of people salivating for the ultimate communication device, it also sets very high expectations for Apple to deliver. iPod changed the way people live their lives; it has caused human beings to evolve.

No Pipes for Me :-|

Coca-colonialism and Tata-colonialism

One of the finest writings that I have recently read is by Swaminathan Aiyar, who writes editorials in Times Of India. Swaminathan's breadth and depth of knowledge about the economic and social subjects around the world, and his special commentary about India's economic growth in the last 5 weeks has been amazing.

I am reproducing a recent article in TOI:

"Consider IBM. For decades it was castigated as a monopolist and epitome of neo-colonialism. IBM was the pioneer of the personal computer, but eventually got beaten so badly by Asian rivals that it sold its entire PC business to Lenovo of China. To survive, IBM became mainly an IT services company.

Leftists may still see that as a new way for IBM to colonise the world, through domination of IT services. But listen to the latest news. IBM sees its future survival as dependent on Indian expertise. Its Indian employees have skyrocketed in number from 4,000 in the early 2000s to 53,000 today.

A document circulated by IBM to its Indian employees projects a workforce of hold your breath 120,000 in India by 2008. IBM is becoming Indian rather than American in terms of employment.


Can this be called IBM's conquest of India? Or is it better called India's conquest of IBM? Should the R&D of Indian scientists in IBM be called American research or Indian research?"