Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (Urdu: نصرت فتح على خاں, born October 13, 1948, died August 16, 1997), was a Pakistani musician, primarily a singer of Qawwali, the devotional music of the Sufis (a mystical tradition within Islam). He featured in Time magazine's 2006 list of 'Asian Heroes'.[1]
Traditionally, Qawwali has been a family affair, passed down through the generations. Nusrat's family has an unbroken tradition of performing qawwali for the last 600 years. Among other honorary titles bestowed upon him, Nusrat was called Shahenshah-e-Qawwali, meaning The Emperor of Qawwali.
I was eagerly waiting to acquire Google's Android OS based based phone released by T-mobile.
Here is the commercial for the phone created by some marketing droid to promote the phone.
They keep emphasizing that phone has keyboard. It has Google map. Great. What about video? I think it does not have it. My old S60 symbian OS based Nokia phone has video. It even has slow crappy Internet connection. All from T-mobile. So basically they are releasing a half baked phone that will improve as time goes along as other Google products do. They are all in perpetual beta mode. To top it all they want two year contract to get the phone. I have been their loyal customer for at least for the last 5 years.
I am terribly disappointed with the lack luster features phone offers and the two year contract.
I have a feeling that Google's viral marketing will not work this time. They do have to match and excel the quality that Nokia and I-phone offer including the feature list.
My guess is that this phone will be more like a Linux OS. Extremely popular in the UNIX loving crowd but some of us who just want a true 3G phone that can take decent pictures and shoot some videos and do some neat things like I-phone have to look for alternatives. I mean it will be a niche product not a contender to displace I-phone from its throne. It lacks charm.
I guess time to start looking into getting a higher end Nokia phone and if t-mobile does not have 3G coverage in my area then to look for different carrier who has it.
One word "Disppointed" after so much pre publicity and hype and wait. I hope some other company releases a better Android phone then this one in the future.
His vision of the future of web applications is very different from what we have now for the web applications. Especially the distribution model where he is endorsing viral distribution of these application as opposed to current shrink wrap model of distribution.
In a way he is endorsing the distribution of digital content and web applications through widgets that will conform to the open social api supported by Google and endorsed by major players in the area of social networking platform developers. Even the fastest growing social networking platform Facebook supports this model. It is just that they have a Facebook application program development interface to develop these applications. Facebook applications already use viral distribution mechanism for its propagation. This puts Facebook ahead in the platform race because Google supported Open social is still in beta while facebook is actively using it and gaining experience on how to actively manage these type of web applications on their application development platform. Also, Microsoft has an stake in Facebook. They can increase it even more.
There is a big talk about Web 3.0 being Semantic web. Most of the web pundits endorse this line of thinking including the web founder Sir Tim Berners Lee. But the way things are shaping up it looks to me that Web 3.0 will be what we call "Social Web" something resembling to Facebook.
After watching this video it is quite obvious that Web 3.0 will be "Social Web" and dreams of semantic web and personal agents running around on the web to do peoples bidding will have to wait for future Web 4.0.
Make MS product sexy. They will have to fight Apple to win this image.
Compared to this here is what Nicholas Carr has to say about Google, the Microsoft competitor on its 10th anniversary.
But while Google has an odd business model, it's not an unprecedented one. The company it most resembles is, ironically, its archrival, Microsoft. Just as Google controls the central money-making engine of the Internet economy (the search engine), Microsoft controlled the central money-making engine of the personal computer economy (the PC operating system). In the PC world, Microsoft had nearly as many complements as Google now has in the Internet world, and Microsoft, too, expanded into a vast number of software and other PC-related businesses - not necessarily to make money directly but to expand PC usage. Microsoft didn't take a cut of every dollar spent in the PC economy, but it took a cut of a lot of them. In the same way, Google takes a cut of many of the dollars that flow through the Net economy. The goal, then, is to keep expanding the economy.
and finally the contrast between the two
Google differs from Microsoft in at least one very important way. The ends that Microsoft has pursued are commercial ends. It's been in it for the money. Google, by contrast, has a strong messianic bent. The Omnigoogle is not just out to make oodles of money; it's on a crusade - to liberate information for the masses - and is convinced of its righteousness in pursuing its cause. Depending on your point of view as you look forward to the next ten years, you'll find that either comforting or not.
It is a interesting contrast in mission between the two big companies and that allows Google to do this to help build the Internet ecosystem and profit from it.
It routinely introduces half-finished products and services as online “betas” because it knows that, even if the offerings fail to win a big share of the market, they will still tend to produce attractive returns by generating advertising revenue and producing valuable data on customer behavior. For most companies, a failed launch of a new product is very costly. For Google, in general, it’s not. Failure is cheap.
That would explain how they can release an open source browser Google Chrome in an over crowded browser market and do not worry about the financial losses they will suffer in supporting this activity.
Image by CaptPiper via Flickr The form factor of the new generation sub compact notebook PC's also known as Netbooks lies somewhere in between a laptop and a smart mobile phone. Their product dimensions are approximately 8.0 x 7 x 1.2 inches ; weighing around 2.2 pounds. This makes them an ideal thin client for cloud computing.
They are about the size of a text book. They are lighter, easier to carry and have the processing capability to effectively run interactive multimedia e-learning content along with complete connectivity to the Internet. These advances in connected devices and Internet infrastructure will provide the necessary boost we need to promote and utilize effective e-learning once the wireless connectivity to the Internet becomes affordable and ubiquitous through seamless integration of WiFi and cellular networking infrastructure.
In other words the current computing and networking infrastructure can support e-learning but it is not an ideal one. The future of e-learning content creation and delivery lies with netbook+wireless networking+Servers supported by cloud computing. Some people will argue that we can use mobile phone to deliver effective e-learning. It is quite possible but the screen on mobile phone is small that restricts the kind of e-learning content that can be delivered through mobile phones.
Only thing missing from Netbooks is tablet PC capabilities. Addition of tablet with write,save and share capabilities will make Netbooks an ideal platform for learning because it will allow student to interact and share their learning with other learners.
I think Netbooks will be very popular if nothing else but for their low cost Internet connecting devices once cloud computing gains some traction.
This is a major shift in computing platform. In fact about the same proportion when computing shifted from mainframes/mini computers to desktop PC's. A fast browser like Google Chrome or something similar will be a major component of this newly emerging computing and communication platform.
Here is a nice commercial from Lenovo, the Chinese company who is responsible for manufacturing IBM laptops:
While we've been dealing with short-form ad fare in the States, China's gone all artsy on us, with Lenovo releasing a short film to promote its S9 / S10 netbook. We won't ruin the plot for you -- the dialogue is all in Chinese, so it's not like we could -- but suffice it to say that the Lenovo S10 and unrequited love play major roles.
The Embedded video shows just fine in the preview of the post but fails to show up in the blog post. A bug somewhere in Blogger code or in the code for embedding video.
Image by jimpg2 via FlickrThe technology press is full of news about the Google's release of Chrome. Most of it seems to be about how Chrome effects the landscape of already over crowded space of many existing Browsers despite the fact that Google has done a good job of explaining why they are releasing a new browser that is more than a browser.
On the surface Google's Chrome appears to be a no frills fast browser but it is much more then that. It has a fast rendering engine "webkit" the same one that powers Safari Browser from Apple. It also has a very fast Javascript rendering engine V8 that will improve the performance of web application such as Google docs and many new web based applications that are competing with desk top applications with the added advantage of user data being available every where on demand. It really is a web application development platform that developers can use to develop future interesting web applications or improve the performance of existing web applications. Once this fact sinks in it will make Chrome a very popular application among developer community. The whole platform is open source so there is no vendor lock in either.
Here is a Google video that provides details about the browser including the improvements in the user experience through improvements in the user interface.
Also, Google released a comic book to introduce Chrome
After going through the video and the comic book it is very clear that there is no hidden agenda here. Chrome's main thrust is to improve the user web experience and move them beyond web browsing and to actually start using the web based applications. This also nicely ties into the mobile computing and web applications running on the mobile platform using cloud computing.
Google is a major proponent and supporter of cloud computing. Chrome is one of the components to support that kind of computing. Here is a Cnet article where Google's Matthew Glotzbach at the Office 2.0 conference explains how cloud computing is good for business.
It seems that future of computing,communication and collaboration is moving away desktops PC's and heading towards smart mobile phones and sub compact laptops such as netbooks.
This shift in computing is good for the users. It brings down the cost of hardware and software, making computing more affordable. However, We will achieve ubiquitous computing only if the mobile tel-communication companies will provide the wireless data transfer cheap enough so that every body can use it.
Former CTO of Cisco systems and a serial entrepreneur talk about the lack of innovation and investment in future.
She has written a new book titled "Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy" that provides detailed overview of the issues involved.
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