I have cleaned up the sidebar; unfortunately, in it’s prior avatar, it was rather bland. Changes were made to the tag cloud and a category cloud has been added.
One of the major changes in the side bar is addition of Duckduckgo as the default search engine for this site. I have been using it extensively over the past few months and I recommend it thoroughly. I have been in touch with it’s developer, who’s put in his own money and has interesting ideas that are being implemented. My only concern about not using other search engines is the opaque policies on privacy and building up an online user profile to track down the individual customer. The technology isn’t perfect but a major impetus on social network has it downsides.
I am a big fan of RSS; I can’t imagine my life without it. Flipboard and other news readers have gained prominence in recent times, are all RSS readers. Unfortunately, a reader is as good as dead; I haven’t seen any major revamp of Google Reader as yet. I do have some ideas panned out about an ideal RSS reader (namely extraction of data and analyzing and categorizing data in real time), but there has been no development of late. (The only example that comes to my mind is Mutt, but it does not have a GUI front end and it’s terminal interface appeals to it’s users so it’s static there). Feed Daemon is a great client for Windows but I don’t use it so it’s disappointment again.
Nevertheless, now you can have RSS feeds for each category listed. The default has been applied after the revamp so you would get to see it more prominently on the cloud.
I haven’t updated “About” page so a cleaning there is also warranted.
The idea is to make it easier to port OUT the content; rather than the people coming on to the main site. Please email me in case you find any problems in accessing the content since I have extensively checked the implementation on my side.
The beauty of the mobile browser is that it is cross platform. I have covered this browser (for mobiles) in earlier write ups too but I think the most significant advance is the pinch to zoom that has come in Opera Mini.
I am currently upgrading the app from Android Market; nevertheless, I suspect that financial agreement with Google stays. Of course, you could always sync with Opera Mobile (the buliker cousin minus the “pre-fetching” of content), but I prefer Mini because in India, the GPRS sucks. I think Opera has a lot to gain with HTML 5 specifications. This would eliminate Flash completely and possibly deliver the videos in real time reducing the overheads in terms of infrastructure.
It’s hard to decide on the specifications and my only interest to put up the post here is to mark a shift in the way Internet is being accessed in other countries. US remains a competitive market; partly because the mechanisms of delivery exist there. In India, people expect it for “free”. This is also one reason why I strongly oppose the “limited broadband” because that would affect the way users interact with the medium. However, rest assured that market is not mature enough for the numbers; there is no strong “demand” to question the pathetic supplies as yet and voice calls dominate the Indian market overwhelmingly.
Register has an interesting write up on upcoming Kindle. I remain deeply opposed to concept of “Ecosystem” which tends to track the users over a period of time to target advertising. There are credible alternatives in Open Source and in recent times, there is a huge surge of developer interest in polishing the user interface. ( FYI, everything on my system is Open Source alone barring a few proprietary codecs and Flash- I am still waiting for HTML 5 to mature so that I ditch it for good).
Kindle and iPad are ugly vestiges of ecosystem (as I mentioned above) which hardly merit attention. I think it was Amazon that has pioneered the use of a recommendation engine to it’s visitors. Apple tracks its payments through it’s iTunes interface keeping a lion’s share of the revenues. The content creators have nothing else but to gnash their teeth because iPad owners (and I would say a huge bunch of idiots and suckers) are most likely to loosen their purse strings for paying up the cash.
Hence it becomes imperative to check out what the linked article has to say.
It is not clear why Apple has delayed enforcing the rule – clearly designed to protect its own revenues, but also its position as the primary point of contact for the user’s mobile activity – until 30 June, since it already barred the Sony Reader app from its App Store last month on the basis of the same terms and conditions….Currently, its Kindle for iOS ereader app handles all ebook sales through Amazon’s own Kindle web store, with the revenue divided only between Amazon and the publishers. The more successful Apple’s tablets and apps are, the more difficult it will be for Amazon to walk away from its iOS platform – but it could whip up a dangerous level of consumer, developer and even regulatory opposition to the iPhone maker (though, as the proud owner of a closed ecosystem itself, it would need to tread carefully).
How do they monetise their platforms:
Amazon is rumoured to be planning a scheme where it will give away free Kindle ereaders, for instance, to customers who commit to certain levels of ebook purchasing, newspaper subscriptions or the Amazon Prime service. And of course, Amazon has an established retail platform and experience that commands high levels of awareness and trust, unlike the other tablet makers. It could enhance this with its own tablet because it could take its own 30 per cent cut of in-app purchases.
How is this going to affect the netbook sales:
For every 10 tablets sold, five netbook or notebook sales will be lost in developed markets, it estimates, limiting notebook growth to 8 per cent year-on-year in 2011, and pushing netbooks into a decline of 13 per cent, to 34 million units. Many areas – especially the US, western Europe, China and Indonesia – will suffer from overstocked retail channels for mobile PCs, although the iPad’s impact on emerging markets will remain minimal.
This is going to be a hard pill to swallow though I am sure that the manufacturers have built in supply chain efficiencies and they could foresee such an event. If I had piles of cash, I would enable Linux on all the netbooks and sell them at subsidised prices or give them away for free with a bundled service. Though this unlikely to happen but if anyone from the telecom industry is reading this, this is your last chance to popularize the 3G offering. Get into hardware sales, bundle it with 3G, work out the costs of supplying it to remote areas and you have assured locked in customers for say, 3 years. The specifics could be worked out but a mobile netbook with open source applications is a great “killer option”. If you choose to support Microsoft Tax (like you as assholes are capable of), this would be unviable in the long run and MS wants Windows 7 or whatever number of their crappy operating system you can imagine to run on the “tablets”. I mean who wants to deal with such demented idiots anyway?
