XBox Kinect: The new user Interface

Here's my post at YourStory on Kinect. Wonder when Microsoft will create an Official driver for Kinect now that the Open Source driver is available.

YourStory.in: To publish my posts

Worked out an arrangement with yourstory.in to publish my posts on topics related to smartphones,cloud computing and social technology in general. Here's the first post.

The Smart phone War is on

Came across the article from eweek on the latest cell phone sales as reported by Gartner. The article is a jumble of numbers and percentages  that seems to be intent on confusing rather than conveying real information.
Here's what I was able to boil down the numbers to.

• There were 417 million Cell phone shipments in the 3Q 2010 A
• 80.5 million were Smart phones. While defining a Smart phone is one of those 'it depends on who you ask' I gather this is what the analysts mean by a smartphone All iPhones ,All Android Phones ,All Blackberry Phones ,All Nokia phones shipping with Symbian S60 operating system,Windows mobile platform phones and Linux(?) phones.

Here's a Pie Chart  that I quickly put together on the smart phone numbers that I hope simplifies things.

My own Analysis.

1. Android clearly has momentum going for it. With multiple manufacturers putting their weight behind the platform I suppose they would take over from Nokia pretty quickly. I guess Steve Jobs rants and the patent cases against HTC are not misplaced. This fake Steve jobs blog seems to sum  up Apple's fear nicely.
2. Apple continues to have mind share and seems to be gaining at the expense of Blackberry.  Also yes they are extremely profitable so they may be happy not being the market leader but still making tons of money. There is always the fear that this may be a repeat of the PC v/s Mac battle but I do think the times and the markets are different.
3. Blackberry (RIM) will go the Palm way if the Torch and Playbook don't do too well in the marketplace. They do have a dedicated set of users and good phones but the challenge for them is whether they are able to stop Apple from eating into the corporate market. 
4. Nokia continues to struggle losing both marketshare and mindshare very rapidly. With Gizmodo famously refusing to reviewing the N8  saying it's " Like a top-of-the-line horse-drawn carriage released shortly after Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon".
5. I do believe Microsoft is late to the party and I would be really surprised if they are able to go beyond 5% of the market share.

 

New Browser in the fray

RockMelt is a new browser that has Marc Andreeson on it's board of directors. It is a first of a kind because it requires a facebook account to gain access to the browser. From the Video it looks to be highly focussed on social networking.From a study by Nielsen from January 2009 the usage is up 82%. Given the exponential rate of growth I wonder what the numbers are by now? As per the study users are spending about 6 hours per month on these sites. If a study were conducted now I would think you would find it at about 6 hours per day.
The internet has evolved from a place to find information to a place where you connect and do things with the people you know. For a lot of the new generation users Facebook and Twitter are the internet and I doubt if they see a difference between social networking on the Internet and real world (what's that?) social networking. While the early days of the internet was all about being anonymous and having an alternate persona the current generation of users see no necessity in hiding things. Probably because it has always been there for them so the trust quotient is higher.
Have to see how it pans out and if they can do better than Flock  that has been around for about 5 years now. I have signed away all my Facebook privileges to get access to the beta so let's wait and see. Watch this space for more.

Amazon AWS event in Bangalore

There was a huge turnout at the Amazon's AWS event in Bangalore. About 750 people turned out for the event and the buzz was great.
The talk from the CTO was similar to the one he gave in Google Atmosphere talk.  Even after all the talks about how cloud computing it is changing everything it is still mind boggling to see the rate at which things are scaring. One figure he mentioned that Amazon has reduced the prices 6 times in the past year takes a while to get used to. The India market seems to be very important to Amazon. Given the latent demand from SMB's who do not have a significant Web presence yet Amazon seems to be right on the money. There are concerns of latency given that the closest Amazon center is out of Singapore but that in itself should not be a show stopper.
The user talks from Redbus.in CTO and the TataSky were a bit disappointing. While the use cases they mentioned were good their deployments are very small scale with 25 servers at redbus and 50 from TataSky. No what you would call 'cloudscale' deployments.

How to export Google Chrome History to MS Excel

Google does a good job  of keeping tracking of your history of the web sites you have visited. There are add on's that allow for a enhanced version of history. But what if you want to do some of your own analysis or need to search and sort stuff you do want the data in excel.

Here are some quick pointers. 

Google Chrome keeps your History in a relational database. It uses SqlLite a lightweight database engine. It is used by Google,Firefox and on many mobile devices. You can find the table structure of the history database and and an analysis over here

I did try to setup an ODBC driver and access the tables through excel but could not get excel to read the data.
There are tools like sqllitebrowser. but I found the  FireFox Plugin sqlitemanager works very well.
Most of the date time fields are stored in the UTC use Jan 1 1600 as the epoch date or zero time. i.e the number that you will get is the microseconds from Jan 1 1600. If you want to convert it excel time (Jan 1 1900) you can add the following calculation in the sql statement on the field.
fieldName/(8.64*10e9) - 109205. Found this formula courtesy of this site.

• (8.64*10^9) is the number of microseconds in a day.
• 109205 is the number of days, including leap days, between 1601 and 1900. 

Do note that this formula is for GMT and does not compensate for Daylight savings Time.
to calculate to your timezone you need to change the second variable
For timezones ahead of GMT
109205 - (Time Diff with GMT/24)

For timezones behind GMT
109205 +  (Time Diff with GMT/24)
So for India (GMT +5.5) it will be
109205- 5.5/24
For a GMT -1 timezone it will be
109205 + 1/24

The Google App Inventor - Visual Basic of the Mobile Phone market?

Saw the video of Google App Inventor. Seems very promising. he buzz about Google Android is very high at least in the developer community. At the Bangalore Barcamp Android was very high. While iPhone was acknowledged as a platform to know almost everybody was bullish about Android. And no the event was not sponsored by Google.
While the official blog seems to be indicate that they are targeting it to the Education market I do think the market will be bigger than that. looking at the video it seems to remind me and a few others of Visual Basic.
While Visual Basic was mocked around as a toy language it was a huge factor in getting Microsoft Developer mind share in the 1990's.  It hid the monstrous Windows API from you and allowed you to put together applications rapidly. More importantly it allowed programmers to get productive very quickly.
I can go on talking about Visual basic as I spent quite few years of my career on it but that's another story.
What is exciting is that App Inventor can unleash a whole new set of programmers onto the Android platform and give Google the same edge that Microsoft had in the nineties. The availability of an army of developers combined with a vibrant market for third party components (VBX, Activex,...)  simply destroyed the market leader (Powerbuilder) and a host of other competitors (Uniface,GuptaSQL, Delphi,Developer2000) simply fell by the wayside.
True the dynamics and usage patterns of the mobile market are different from the PC market and the client server era but some of the fundamentals still remain the same. Platforms that have a huge developer base will have a huge market edge. With a lot of the handset makers  moving to Android and with 200,00 activations per day Google definitely seems to have made the right moves. And while I am reading the tea leaves Hello Android book is No 2 in the Software Development list at Amazon.
So will App Inventor live up to it's hype? Watch this space as I wait impatiently for access to the Platform.