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.

Unacceptable Content

So I got a rejection letter from Google Adsense. Not worried so much about the rejection but more irritated by the response . Searching the web I found that this is par for course and there a lot of people get a letter like this.
For a company that prides itself in making information easily available it is strange at the total lack of information for the rejection. Seems to me the purpose of the letter is to be necessarily vague so that they don't get sued.
How on earth dose anyone know what policy they  have violated? And as the blog  be at least 6 months old in many Asian countries but there is no 'official' list.
And of course writing this blog post may be deemed 'Unacceptable Content' so I may never get onto Adsense :)

Cloud and the small Business

This article at forbes addresses how small businesses are rapidly embracing cloud and what are the potential success factors needed to address the small business space. All the major players are making products in this space. As pointed out in the article the Cloud does enable the small Business segment to buy and consume services without the pain of buying, setting up and maintaining hardware infrastructure and software products.  

In my opinion selling applications to the small businesses could be  the Long Tail of the Cloud. For those not familiar the Long Tail by Chris Anderson talks about how the internet enabled businesses like Amazon to cater to niche audiences that were not served by big retailers due to the low volume of business. I do not believe that there will be vendor loyalty and the businesses will cherry pick the services from multiple vendors.
Vendors like Zoho are aggressively targeting this space with services in the $10-$12. I do believe that there will be a market for custom applications as well. Maybe not for an individual business but for a cluster of businesses. CustomerSquare run by a friend of mine is targeting specific verticals in the retail space. The cloud   reduces the risk significantly for the small business provider . He pays per month , if it doesn't suit him he can dump it with a second thought. He will not be stuck with a boxed piece of software that lies unused. For the vendor also there is an increasing opportunity to upsell services , add small incremental features ,test market them and get additional revenue. He get's instant feedback and can drop things that don't work out well. No more long product cycles and no more upgrade battles.

Cloud Computing - Harnessing the Client side power

A common vision of cloud computing is of massive data centers running in remote locations and clients utilizing the power over the network.
One aspect of the Cloud computing that I still believe is in infancy is in utilizing the client side computing power.
This team here  at MIT used a cluster of Nokia N900 smartphones to deploy a version of MapReduce called misco.
While there are challenges with reliability and network failure there are a lot of potential ways in which this could develop and I am going to indulge myself a bit in some fanciful thinking.
 The co location and GPS capabilities are fairly well developed in the telecom world. What if the smartphones within a particular network tower are able to automatically form a collaborative network?Wouldn't that lead to faster responses and quicker processing for a map reduce kind of  problems. We could be looking at self forming networks that could be used in disaster recovery efforts.
And what about within a private area like an office or a university campus? The availability of these client side devices are fairly predictable. You could expect these devices to be available during the working hours. The organization can potentially harness this additional capacity. This 'loosely coupled network' will require an intelligent design to manage  it effectively but it does open a lot of possibilities. While the processing power of Arm processors may not be much compared to Server processors they are quite powerful. And with ever increasing power on the client side who knows what this may lead up to?

World's Toughest Sudoku - Solved

Here's a solution to the 'World's Toughest Sudoku' puzzle that is doing the rounds of the news.

Not sure what the basis is for calling it the toughest sudoku puzzle but here is the solution.

Allow me to gloat over it :). Used my own excel sheet that I developed a little while ago. Took about an hour to solve it. Would be very tough to do it manually on a single sheet . The solution needs multiple iterations. Much easier to do conjectures using the computer as it's easy to rollback at any stage.

Is Cloud a throwback to the mainframe era?

A common refrain that we hear is that cloud computing is nothing new but a fall back to the centralized model of computing that existed in the seventies. After all Virtualization is a technology whose origin goes back to the mainframe days and languished while the desktop took sway.
I do believe that people are missing the point about the cloud by comparing it to the mainframe era. Yes it does mean more centralization of resource pools but there are some fundamental differences.
Mainframe computing was about efficient utilization of scarce resources. Everything from CPU, RAM , storage and network were expensive and the goal of the mainframe operating systems and the system administrators was to ensure that these resources were utilized to the maximum and that there was no wastage. The decision to use 2 bits to store the year and not 4 was purely driven by the fact that storage was extremely expensive.
Cloud Computing is more about getting more out of abundant resources. The cost of computing resources (except network bandwidth) has become really trivial and are hardly factors in the decision making process.
Amazon's EC2 was really about generating revenue from idle resources and ensuring that their vast computing resources get better utilized. We can get terabytes of storage available at cheap rates but a service like dropbox offers convenience and an easy way to manage your storage needs across machines.
Cloud computing is about gaining efficiency in managing the computing resources. So while the cost of processing power and storage has fallen exponentially the limiting factor is in managing these resources.
If you are looking to use dropbox do use my referral link as both of us can get an additional 250MB more that way.

Restarting My Posts

Ok Now that I have moved on from my job and have cleared my head on what I want to do (I think!) here's my first post after a long break. Plan to blog a lot more now and enjoy doing it.