If you did not get the title, google blackberry torch. They launched blackberry OS 6 tonight(for the late readers, 3rd day of August 2010). They also launched a phone to buckle up OS 6, which is name torch (torch?? i was hoping for a better, sensible, and meaningful name. Don’t be surprised if next blackberry phone is named after a monstrous 20 wheel automobile called truck or trailer). I must admit i was hoping for this launch since some time now. I have been using a blackberry bold 9000 since some time now. I must admit that my hopes with them took a downward spiral today. I was sincerely hoping that they would come up with a platform with could at least stand in the same line as droid X and iPhone4, if not give them a run for their money. After going through their official blog post, i could help myself jotting down my thoughts on my macbook, at almost midnight IST. I am still struggling to understand the novelty in their blog post regarding something that is named after a device whose only similarity with the handset is the fact that it too is powered by NiMh batteries. The blog post, at the time of writing this post was available at http://blogs.blackberry.com/2010/08/blackberry-torch/.

Following are the excerpts from the post, followed by some notes by an idiot, who still found it tough to get the broader picture (if any)

Today, I am thrilled to introduce the world’s first smartphone with a BlackBerry® keyboard and full touch screen – the BlackBerry® Torch™ 9800.

First, there is a big I in it. I thought that there was a big team behind it. Second, World’s first smartphone with Blackberry keyboard and full touch screen seems analogous to world’s first smartphone with android keyboard and touchscreen(the very first android had that).

It comes with the new BlackBerry 6 operating system and there is a lot to be excited about. BlackBerry 6 has something for everyone and personally, I am particularly enjoying the new universal search and auto-wrap text zoom features.

Wow! either iPhone and android are not available in Canada, or they somehow become invisible when they come in reach of RIM. I would have really appreciated if such an statement would have come from someone from North Korea (oops, they call it Korea. Many there do not even know that there is a country called South Korea). Also, it is hard to believe that it is 6th version of their OS, and still struggling to match 2nd version of android!

We spent a lot of time talking with customers, testing and re-testing the software to make sure we could deliver the new features users want without losing any important aspects of the user experience that our customers already know and love. BlackBerry 6 delivers a stunning visual design and the teams here have done an incredible job implementing the amazing array of enhancements, including our new WebKit-based web browser which was first previewed at MWC earlier this year.

BB Engg:- Sir, we have tried to build a browser on restricted hardware, but still, it is far from mosaic 1.0(read netscape).

CEO:- What are other’s doing?

BB Engg:- They are using webkit. and it works really good.

CEO :- Then why the fuck are you wasting my time! Lets use it too. You go ahead and port it! I’ll take care of using some new adjectives during the launch.

With the new BlackBerry Torch smartphone, we also believe our hardware team has delivered the best combined touch-qwerty experience available, seamlessly incorporating our signature BlackBerry keyboard and precision trackpad in a striking design that simply feels great in your hand. One of the things I love the most about the BlackBerry Torch design is the way it allows me to easily transition between using the touch screen, trackpad and keyboard interfaces. I can switch between them and interact with the handset and applications in a very natural way.

Tell me, who in this world would first use the phone in fashion as put up! A free beer to the person!

The BlackBerry Torch is also the first BlackBerry smartphone to ship with our new web browser and we invested a substantial amount of time and effort to engineer a WebKit-based browser that can operate quickly, beautifully and efficiently. In fact, Peter Rysavy today released a new study reporting on the efficiency of the BlackBerry 6 Browser with respect to data usage. We continue to believe that efficiency is an important advantage for our customers and an imperative for the wireless industry.

With all due respect to webkit, guys! RIM! you did not invent webkit! You first ported the fact that webkit can be a good mobile browser, and then you ported webkit.

At RIM we have a long history of building groundbreaking technology, and we are passionate about our products – each day, thousands of RIM employees are focused on enhancing our software, services and smartphones in order to continue meeting your changing wants and needs. The launch of the BlackBerry Torch with BlackBerry 6 is one of the most significant launches in our history and this amazing new smartphone brings together many of RIM’s core strengths into one fluid and superior user experience.

Well! RIM have put some weight on the fact that it is not necessary that early movers are not always the in best innovators. No one doubts them being pioneers of, if not smartphones, wireless email devices. Messaging if the only core strength of RIM. If they continue to “innovate” in this fashion, they might loose it too!(in fact they have almost lost it too! They held an advantage when traditional email did not work properly on handhelds due to many limitations like HTML rendering etc. Current smartphones do not have any of them, thus i feel that messaging experience at par with desktop is not far. )

After reading the specs of torch on mobilecrunch, 624MHz CPU struck me most. Bold 9000 had it too. So, in short, they have same hardware platform, with new OS 6!(which seems like ios and android morph).

I had high hopes on them. Being a long time blackberry user, i have decided not to continue with them. Even Samsung galaxy is a better one as of date.

Disclaimer 1:- I had applied to RIM as a product manager last year, but my application was gracefully turned down.

Discalimer 2:- Old monk with coke is good food for thought and typos!

Related articles by Zemanta

• RIM lights a candle for the BlackBerry Torch (go.theregister.com)
• RIM takes wraps off new BlackBerry Torch (marketwatch.com)
• RIM attempts to create Apple-like buzz with BlackBerry Torch event (Katie Marsal/AppleInsider) (techmeme.com)
• Here’s What The BlackBerry Torch Looks Like (RIMM, T) (businessinsider.com)
• RIM removes the veil on BlackBerry 6 and the new BlackBerry Torch (zdnet.com)
• BlackBerry Torch Vodafone UK launch confirmed (slashgear.com)
• Catching up: RIM launches BlackBerry Torch, touch-based OS 6 (arstechnica.com)
• RIM announces BlackBerry Torch 9800 for AT&T with QWERTY and touchscreen (zdnet.com)
• BlackBerry Torch announced (boingboing.net)
• The BlackBerry Torch: A Slider Touchscreen Running BlackBerry 6 OS (mobilecrunch.com)
• RIM prepares to fight back with Torch, its best BlackBerry ever (sfgate.com)

After a long time i gave thunderbird another try. The interface feels a lot better, but still i miss the conversation view as in gmail. It is not much interactive in thunderbird. That is simple, but huge usability improvement (if implemented). The search result page looks good, and analytics give a refreshing feeling. Personas add beauty to otherwise gray matter .

In short, you will like it a lot

I was reading Adam L. Penenberg’s Viral Loop since last 3 weeks. In last few years, Viral, perhaps is fastest-to-become-a-cliche word. Every second self styled social scientist tech czar must have mentioned it countless times.

Adam has been doing some writing assignments for Ning sometime back. The article was published for fast company, and can be read here. Adam continued working and finally published this book. (I did not know this initially. Ning was mentioned in the book for a painful number of times, which intrigued me into Adam’s Ning connection. Upon googling, i hit Andrew Chen’s review of this book. He has mentioned this fact in his review.)

Adam starts with defining viral paradigm by two examples, Ponzi schemes, and tupperware (perhaps the pioneer in viral marketing). After that first half of the book is dedicated to Mark Andreesson’s Mosaic, Netscape and ‘the’ Ning. Second half to Ebay, PayPal, Youtube, Facebook, Zynga and Twitter.

The book is mostly a history text with occasional one or two pages dedicated to analysis and some graphs and equations on the basis of analysis. It is best read skipping the analysis portions (arguably). The story portions are more informative and will really provide the kick (but most of it is also available on web in some form or the other. Wikipedia has most of it already).

Overall, if there was some less Ning in it, i would have liked it more. Ning is fine, but potraying it as the ultimate Web2.0 success, seems a bit far from reality.

Its been quite some time since i switched to Zemanta. The thing works like cakewalk. I got to know about it through Fred Wilson. He has hosted it on his own blog. Being an early adopter, i could not stop myself in putting it on the pages. It turns out to be a good blogging assistant. I plan to continue using it for some time atleast. Zemanta has contributed to an image and a couple of links below each blog post. I do not use the linking and tagging feature much.

Zemanta can be better undertood as an elderly learned fellow who takes a look at your scriblings and suggests that you can augment the draft with subtle links, pictures, links and tags. Reminds me of a university professor who used to send detailed mails after reading the initial drafts of papers .

I would like to see the support for standard blogging clients like scribefire, as well as ability to pick up things from the same blog in order to redice the cross reference time.

I used scribefire to write this post. I saved it as draft, logged into the client and zemantified it before showing it the browser window.

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Image via Bandhan

Modern india also carries lots of ancient values. A time-proven and reliable one of them is match making. There have been a couple of websites like shaadi, bharatmatrimony, jeevansaathi, simplymarry; which took matchmaking on the information superhighway.

The typical opportunity windows gives rise to multiple people solving the same problem. This leads in multiple simlar solutions. If there is no provision store in the area, mutiple of those open in a stipulated time frame. People choose one according to their convenience. Convenience is defined of per case basis. In case of provision stores, it is normally the distance from their houses. Similar thing happens with typically any content website, and same happened to online matrimony as well. A lot of these sites appeared from nowhere and each of them boasts of a decent number of users.

How does a consumer use these websites? She registers on all of them, and simply searches of all time to time. This leads to a high barrier discovery problem, and increased time to reach something valuable.

Bandhan solves this problem by not only searching across all these websites, but also providing a much easy and intuitive search experience to the users. No need to register on all these sites, simply hit bandhan in you favourite browser and search. You can nicely further modify your searches using the attributes that they provide. If you understand RSS, the search results can be cooked in that flavour. You can simply put your attributes and then subscribe to that particular feed in your favourite feed reader. The new results would be pushed to you as and when there are new profiles

To conclude, bandhan would make the user happy about searching the matrimonial content available on internet. I know one of bandhan’s founders, Shashikant Kore, very well. We have worked together in past. Shashi will be posting more about his journey to Bandhan soon on this blog. He blogs at http://bechalis.blogspot.com/.

Bandhan screenshot

Image via Wikipedia

In case you do not have a zott idea about the headline, let me assist you with what wikipedia says about fennec.

The Fennec Fox (Vulpes zerda) is a small nocturnal fox found in the Sahara Desert of North Africa which has distinctive very large ears.

Firefox for mobile phones has been named Fennec. A very very early alpha release has been pushed on the web for users to try out. It can be installed on Nokia N810 tablet. Unfortunately, i am not rich enough to get my hands on one . There are a couple of videos floating around to give you a feel of how it looks like on the tablet.

Fennec Alpha Walkthrough from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.

It has some major UI changes over existing browsers on windows mobile, symbain, and other handheld devices. The tabs are on left side, and other back, forward buttons are on right side, and search is at bottom. Nokia N810 is a bit different from other handhelds, as it is supposed to be operated from both hands. The buttons are justified, as user would use her thumbs to browse. However, this should not be a standard, as and when ported to a different formfactor handhelds (my Motorola E8). Designing a UI for handhelds is a very big challenge, as there is an explosion of form factors as compared to Laptops/PCs (reminds me of automobiles ). It would be interesting to see how mozilla solves this problem.

The browser supports plugins, so youtube will be available as long as our Adobe friends are in line with our interests. Renedering seems good, and some sites report the jvascript engine to be 600% faster than existing mobile browsers.

Related articles on the web

• Download First Firefox Mobile Alpha Release [Firefox Mobile]
• Firefox for Mobile: What you need to know
• Mobile Firefox AKA Fennec is Here and Ready for Testing
• First Firefox Mobile Alpha Released
• Shots of FF Mobile (Fennec) on WinMo, 88 on Acid3
• Mozilla Gets Touchy and Feely With Firefox ‘Fennec’ Mobile

Google announced Chrome, last night, and promised to deliver tonight IST. In case you still are unaware read the official google blog. In case you have any questions about the motive for this game, they have tried to cool the hot heads and foxes through a comic book strip. Its a a couple of pages of scriptures, and will take some time to go through. I liked the idea of marketing their initiative though a comic strip. It answers and lot of questions you might have, and is like FAQ 2.0. It focuses around Why, How and What. A new browser on the block was bound to get some curved eyebrows. After all, google has widely endorsed firefox (and continues to do so).

Following is the summary :-

1. It is grandchild of webkit.

2. It has tabs.

3. Each tab runs in separate process, which means, firefox’s memory leak problems might go away. In case of a crash, only one tab dies.

4. Javascript also gets a virtual machine model, no more asynchronous stuff.

5. Homepage has been improved a lot.

6. Gears supported.

7. Multithreaded.

8. Detachable tabs.

9.  Mozilla prism like functionality.

10. Tab bound sandboxes.

11. Plugin support (pligins not sandboxed)

12. Open source.

Looks like an impressive list to me. Combines the experience of desktop apps and power of web apps. They have used the word process so many times, that i am a bit curious about what happens when i open standard 35 tabs like firefox. Our friendly fox is single threaded, which means that all tabs share same memory space. I suspect that initial memory footprint is a bit high in case of chrome, which can lead to a bit of problems in case of memory starved PCs. I see a lot of context switiching between processes.

The more active apps you use, the more is the active work done by each process. For example, i use youtube to listen to music instead of watching the videos. i build a playlist for this. Thus, one tab is reserved for youtube. In case you use many bandwidth consuming, rendering heavy apps, this might slow down chrome a bit, but it would scale well when majority of your tabs are mere text based static web pages.

The good side is that if one rouge javascript is not sticking to its business, the whole browser might not come down (and you will not loose your tabs and your research on fixing the latest bug).

The sandboxing is still not very clear, thus, it will be interesting to see how cookies and all work (I see people using cookies for interprocess communication more and more).

Gears, though has been around since some time, but is still to take off. So i do not see that as a killer feature.

More juice after some chroming!!

Early morning i stumbled across “xxxx Hulu invites up for grabs!” almost 4 times on my daily RSS ritual. I quietly registered an account with them capitalising on GigaOM. The same post in a different syntax was also available on ReadWriteWeb and Techcrunch. Scoble was left out this time.

Techcrunch distributed 5000+2500 invites, whereas GigaOM and RWW distributed 2500 invites each. Apparently Hulu, which is a newscorp and Fox baby, is looking to launch itself soon (softly). Gmail utilized power of more demand-less supply by introducing invites. Apart from other reasons, it surely was a for appropriately scaling up the system. (I was in grad school then. Google guys distributed free gmail invites to all present in auditorium, which was greeted with wow!).

The average reader of these blogs is an early adopter, which would help hulu in its testing plans, but on the flip side, this is a crowd hungry to try out new things, and can be easily lured elsewhere by a simple two line announcement of some new product. Distillation will not yeild many active users from this population. I myself am registered on almost every site these guys speak about!(and thus contributing to fake and exorbitant evaluations!).

PS:- arrrrggggg,, Hulu is available to US residents only. Cmmon!!! that’s not fair! Gods must be crazy!

Blogged with Flock

Tags: huluinvite

YouTube was a phenomenon. It made popular a new way to view content on the web. This revolution was taken further by Flickr, Slide, Slideshare, Scribd for various other kinds of content ranging from pictures, presentations, documents etc. After a reasonable set was covered,the next emerging wave is a long tail of startups like youtube for enterprises, scribd for doctors etc. In the same line is DocStoc, posing as “YouTube for professional documents”.

DocStoc has been around since sometime now, in private beta. It is available publicaly (still in Beta-is-new-1.0-mode). It is backed by Scott Walchek (Baidu), Brett Brewer (Intermix) and Robin Richards (mp3.com). It aims the “high quality” legal, business, financial, educational docs, blogs etc. It has an intelligent classification, soothing icon work, and good usability (with some glitches in search). It has been bootstrapped with some content, and is overall impressive.

So far there has been some good activity there. It will be nice to see if they will succeed in maintaining content quality, but their marketing campaign on throwing an iPod to “the” one who uploads most documents, speaks otherwise. On one hand, this is a good move to increase the influx of docs on their website, but also, sudden influx might degraded the quality. Once quality takes a backseat, then it is no different than any other document sharing website. I’m sure Jason and others have thought on this very well.

It is a good platform with some nice content visible on it. But in order to be ”one stop destination”, UGC alone won’t work. They should look into content partnerships with publishers like springer etc. I would love to have conference proceedings and journal papers easily accessible through their platform. This will attract more users. Publishers already are struggling to cope up with web2.0 with many starting their own portals for accessing their content. DocStoc has the potential to help those guys out and widen their footprint.  

India has a total of approximately 201 million cellphone subscribers as compared to 39 million landline subscribers. And this number is stopping nowhere. They are adding a delta 100 million each year and or around 8 million each month. This is a huge market, and a lot of startups are throwing their offerings in the ring to woo the customer. With SMS traffic expected to reach around 180 billion by 2010 in india, it was the right time to marry it with innovative ideas to build some real good and useful tools.

SMS(texting) has been a great success in India. With indian customer still does not flash iPhones, blackberrys, communicators, pocketPCs, smartphones that often, either due to availability issues or exorbitant pricing, or both. The only service that works on all kinds of handsets is SMS(so far i haven’t come across a phone not featuring SMS facility. Please enlighten me if it exists). Thus, logically, any innovation over/for/with SMS automatically has a good footprint.

A significant portion of SMS traffic in india is of SMS forwards. If you are in India, and you have a healthy social circle, then time and again you might be greeted with SMS forwards ranging from quotes, jokes, greetings from your family, friends, love interest, ex love interest etc. Some people have a reputation of sending good forwards that brings grin across your faces. Sending a forward never hurts you. You end up sharing it with sometimes 5-6 folks, and sometimes even more than that. Now there is a startup trying to make your forwarding experience even better. A brilliant idea, smart execution,nice blended features, intuitive usability, mass appeal, catchy name and loads of fun; is them.

Vakow! is an answer to some of my problems i mentioned in my earlier blogpost. I usually run out of SMS storage on SIM, and find it tough to manage messages. I am always curious about the origin of this funny SMS, and how popular it is. How many people might have received it, and lots of other such questions . Being a lazy person, i always end up sending the latest new year greeting i received, to my family :-), now I have a better option .

Details please?

Vakow! is an offering from two IIT Bombay alumnous, Rahul Gupta(who prefers to be known as RG:)) and Amit Upadhyay. Vakow! exposes the dark matter in SMS space. It helps you to discover popular SMS forwards, which was not possible till now. It allows to rate an existing SMS forward, someone else posted on their website. You can forward these SMS’s to your loved ones, free of cost. Also, there is an option of tagging SMS’s alongside rating. Other than you waiting for someone to forward this to you, you can subscribe to different users to get SMS’s as soon they post it, or as soon as it becomes popular(which feature i haven’t seen in any other application). Tag based subscription is also an option. You can always control the “quality” of SMS’s which you wish to receive from your subscriptions by adjusting the threshold rating. Plus, if you do not wish to be disturbed on phone, and still do not wish to miss the next interesting creation by someone else (which i’m sure everyone is), you can redirect it to your mailbox as well. It is always fun reading messages on Vakow!. Should i admit, it is FUN!

Why should you send your forwards to Vakow!?

Out of many reasons, the most promising is that they are forever stored on Vakow!. No risk of loosing them when you loose your cellphone, SIM next time. Plus if you do create lot of forwards, this is a boon for you. Ratings help to increase the visibility and potential footprint of your messages. You can post your messages from cellphone, or from web itself. Posting from cellphone does not burn holes in your pocket, as they are not a “special” number. Thus, posting a message on Vakow! costs as much as forwarding a message to you friends. I wished it could save me from pains of forwarding my existing SMS base to vakow in one go. I spoke to the founders, and they seem interested in doing this in near future along with many other interesting ideas to make the experience better. AddressBook is under development, and more SMS analytics to appear in near future.

Conclusion

Indian market is a bit different from US and Eurpean markets. But majority of “innovation” that happens here is either cloned from some existing success story. India has majority of low end phones, does not have GPRS as its costly, and older generation is still not tech savvy. I had great pains while explaining texting to my parents. Thus, only ideas that are simple, and does not require rocket science, might get clicking here. In other words, any success story abroad, if implemented as it is, might not work in India. It has a huge subscriber base, which is increasing by nearly 10 million per month. So there is an opportunity, but still real innovations are still far. So far, mobile providers have not received a great success because of there reluctance in understanding the indian market, and persistence with replicating US/European success stories. Vakow! is an example of one of those products having mass appeal in india, reflects good thinking, and are really innovative with respect to indian market. I feel it going on to be a success story if they keep up the pace of innovation. We expect more such ideas from Vakow team.