Blackberry is synonymous with suits. Suits love it. It has a huge market share in its enterprise offering. Perhaps it enjoys the monopoly amongst them. A corporate pocket without blackberry is almost unheard of.

Lately, after iPhone and Android, RIM has become interested in getting a piece of consumer cake as well. traditionally it has been an enterprise company. Thus, it is facing hiccups on jumping into the consumer bandwagon. This is evident from reviews of torch and OS 6.

The RIM’s solution of push email got traction because when it was launched, the handheld devices were lacking computing power. Now a handheld device has 1 Ghz cpu and decent memory. Which signifies that all the computing task that has been delegated to RIM’s servers, can be performed on device itself. This makes the concept of push email redundant. Devices are giving same email experience as outlook or any other desktop client. Sooner rather than later, a simple https connection between the device and email servers would achieve same thing as that with blackberrys.

RIM should focus on its most loyal customers, the enterprise folks. It should put the muscle behind making their lives easier rather than loosing focusing towards consumer market. There are plenty of facets of innovation in enterprise space. Noone else is in better position to do so apart from RIM. They already hold the market. Just need to push towards designing features for the suits. They would love it, and would not mind paying (a lot of) money for the same.Otherwise, RIM would join the palm soon.

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• European Commission Rejects BlackBerry in Favor of iPhones and HTC Phones (readwriteweb.com)
• Attacking RIM’s enterprise beachhead: What iPhone, Android need to achieve victory (zdnet.com)
• Android phones selling faster than iPhone, closing in on RIM (arstechnica.com)
• Android Surpasses Even RIM In This Study (informationweek.com)
• Analysis: BlackBerry flap not likely to hurt RIM over time (reuters.com)
• Sorry, But The BlackBerry Torch Won’t Save RIM (RIMM, AAPL, GOOG, MSFT) (businessinsider.com)
• iPhone Killer? RIM Unveils BlackBerry Torch- BlackBerry to Block Porn, Allow Spying? (foxnews.com)
• Carrying a Torch for RIM – the Gartenberg Take (slashgear.com)
• Sorry, but BlackBerry Torch won’t save RIM (financialpost.com)

Google ceased to support wave today, for not many were wise to understand it. Eric Schmit followed the murder by a series of interviews to some of the most reputed Jehovahs of the tech blogging institution. I still remember it being launched in previous google IO by two brothers and a fat lady (read PM, steph hannon). The most hilarious part of that talk was the lady requesting to do a mexican wave if someone realized the coolness.!Noone did it then. Noone would do it today. Reason? people still do not what it is!

It was launched in an invite only fashion. Whomsoever idea it was, it was absurd. This worked for gmail. Reason? Folks already understood what an email is. They have been using email for quite some time. All knew what to compare gmail with. Since their brains could compare, they could realize the wow’s of gmail. No wonder gmail accounts were being traded on ebay.

Wave, on the other hand, did not go well with folks. It can do lot of things, but would one use it? What problem it solves? How does it help me in day to day work? What am i missing if i am not using wave? Lot of questions still remain to be answered. Many of these doubts would have been solved if it was accessible to people when it mattered most, right after the launch. Most got the account quite late, and by either all had lost interest in the next big thing.

Well, i hate to see it go down, but even i took much time to understand it fully. For a new product, restrictions do not make any sense. Rather, one should spend time with more users to get them familiar. Clearly product management did a bad job here.Merely aping gmail’s reason for success turned out to be primary reason for failure!

Discalimer :- Old Monk is still the source of ideas and typos!

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• Wave goodbye to Google wave. (adland.tv)
• Google Kills Wave Development (tech.slashdot.org)
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• Google Wave and disruptive simplicity (castingoutnines.wordpress.com)
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• Goodbye Google Wave (sporkings.com)

Ubuntu pushed out Lucid Lynx some time back. This is one of the major milestones, which will expedite the drift to it. However, as always, some blockers exist. The funniest of them all comes when lucid updates it for the first time. Somehow, network-manager becomes arrogant and starts misbehaving. Following are the symptoms of this problem

1. Network Manager Applet behaves does an up and down and unable to connect to the network.
2. you are unable to ping.
3. ifconfig tells you that interface exists, but IP address is not visible in the output
4. daemon.log tells that call to dhclient has resulted in “Usage: ……” message

The reason? Yes, it is unable to run dhclient in order to get the IP Address from the remote dhcp server.

Solutions? Many claim to solve it, but none worked for me. Forums would tell that this issue is due to some icon shit, other tell that dhclient is not being called properly (the later one is true). Seems like dhclient and network-manager have started speaking french and german instead of normal english.

What worked for me? wicd is a new network management tool. I gave it a try and removed network-manager. Also, i installed dhcpd. All worked well after this.

sudo apt-get install wicd

sudo apt-get install dhcpd

sudo apt-get remove network-manager

sudo init 6

Bonus tip: If you are unable to connect to google docs account from openoffice using gdocs extension, then put the folllowing command.

sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-java-common

It will install and work after this.

Read more ….

• Dustin Kirkland: Have you taken Lucid for a testrive yet? (dustinkirkland.com)
• Ubuntu Lucid icons for Caffeine – the computer sleep inhibitor (omgubuntu.co.uk)
• Chromium Daily shifts buttons to the left for Ubuntu users (omgubuntu.co.uk)
• Skype Added In Official Ubuntu Repository (techie-buzz.com)
• Chuck Frain: Maryland Lucid Release Party May 1 (chuckfrain.net)
• New Proposed Lucid Theme – ‘Sorbet’ (omgubuntu.co.uk)
• How are you updating to Lucid Lynx? (omgubuntu.co.uk)

According to Darwin, everything that evolves, survives. This can be aptly applied to computer science and modern information technology. When i was i grad school, there was no firefox, iphone, android, twitter, gmail, reader, facebook, google IPO, and lot of other things that you see around today. Following used to be the tools we used then.

1. Browser – Mozilla used to be a big favourite. Firebird appeared on scene (it is known as firefox now).
2. Email – Yahoo mail used to be de-facto mail. Although, not many used it actively. We used to rely on IIT mailserver.
3. Blogging – Pretty initial versions of wordpress, and sometimes blogger.
4. Photosharing – Flickr was there. But we still used open source photo albums like JAlbum to host it on our respective websites.
5. Camera – I purchased a 2 Megapixel Canon powershot A60 for 17k bucks then! Now i am sure kaddy can be laughing reading this. NagP got an A70 a few months later, and Kalam got an A80 from Singapore few months further.
6. Phones – I would not even mention this. These were either b/w phones or 8 bit candybars.
7. Online videos – NA (Youtube was launched in feb 2005)
8. Social networking – Orkut (was not completely “owned” by google then).
9. Laptops – Used a Dell inspiron 8000 which costed me 1Lakh ($2000).
10. Office tools – openoffice/staroffice
11. Other mentions – Digg and stumbleupon.

Now in 2010 following is the configuration

1. Browser – Chrome and Firefox(occasionally)
2. Email – Gmail(and google apps)
3. Blogging – I still use hosted wordpress and twitter.
4. Photosharing – Picasa and facebook.
5. Camera – Sony SR7 FullHD and Canon powershot 12 MP
6. Phones – Blackberry, Android
7. Online videos – Youtube.
8. Social networking – Facebook
9. Laptops – Macbook and Dell vostro (costing 30k INR)
10. Office tools – Google docs.
11. Other mentions – Google maps, iphone

Disclaimer – Please read these in my personal context. This is not the general consumer usage trend.

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Lets start with an adage. “I was so occupied in work that i did not get time to blog!”.

Now some details.

• I have moved migrated to a better server machine for this blog. The last machine was hacked and became part of a botnet for some 2-3 days. Really ashamed to disclose this. The machine was running and pretty old version of Ubuntu dirtro. It was time to rebuild, and upon some research, i decided to migrate instead of rebuilding. First migration after 4 years.
• I suddenly decided to play with iPhone apps. I had a pretty old apple developer account. I bought a macbook, courtsey my younger brother
• Got a new Wii, and spend a couple of nights first playing with it, then modding it, and then playing again It now runs linux and mplayer as apps.
• I realized that movable type is not my piece.
• I learned erlang, android and iphone.
• I got a blackberry bold.
• I got a new car (actually swapped with Dad’s new car).
• I gained a lot of weight and latest tests report increased LDL cholesterol and alarming triglyceride levels. Have started exercising again since last one week.
• Said goodbye to many friends imigrating abroad for studies and work.
• Have experienced how doctors in US and India make fool of patients.

And i finish this post by yet another cliche. “I promise i will resume blogging again.”

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Found this randomly on internet.

I have finished migration to new wordpress completely. This also includes the new blog on a new machine. Have assigned a subdomain to it. It is now blog.jatspeak.com instead of jatspeak.com/blog. The RSS feeds pointing to older blog need to be changed, i have tweaked it to serve contents from newer blog.

The new feature set includes :-

1. Ditching google analytics for wordpress’s own analytics engine.

2. Wordpress 2.6.0

3. Fork+K2

4. Zemanta recommendation engine, It helps the author to link more and more posts Aids content creation.

Following is now obsolete

1. Dreamhost.

2. Sphere blog recommendation engine.

3. Feedjit traffic widget (Still searching a better one. recommendations welcome)

4. smsgupshup widgets. (Kaddy won’t be happy)

5. I curbed the footer index as well. Am not happy about that. That will come back soon. Currently K2 does not have that.

I was facing problems in RSS migration. Apparently dreamhost was not allowing fetching files though php. So, i have put together an ugly hack. I pull the file from new machine on older one though wget, and then read it to output. This is bad! but it works! So, as always, first make it work, and then make it better.

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!!

Paul Graham of Ycombinator fame, has published a wishlist of the ideas they would like to fund coming season. The original article is available here. Since i hate unnecessary clicks, i am pasting the post here. All you startup junkies, its high time to get your brains working. Buy some caffeine on your way back to home today evening, and burn some extra watts to come up with something meaningful. You might be Kevin Rose 2.0, new::Zuckerberg

Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund
Paul Graham
July 2008

When we read Y Combinator applications there are always ideas we’re hoping to see. In the past we’ve never said publicly what they are. If we say we’re looking for x, we’ll get applications proposing x, certainly. But then it actually becomes harder to judge them: is this group proposing x because they were already thinking about it, or because they know that’s what we want to hear?

We don’t like to sit on these ideas, though, because we really want people to work on them. So we’re trying something new: we’re going to list some of the ideas we’ve been waiting to see, but only describe them in general terms. It may be that recipes for ideas are the most useful form anyway, because imaginative people will take them in directions we didn’t anticipate.

Please don’t feel that if you want to apply to Y Combinator, you have to work on one of these types of ideas. If we’ve learned nothing else from doing YC, it’s how little we know. Many of the best startups we’ve funded, like Loopt, proposed things we’d never considered.

1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom. Something is broken when Sony and Universal are suing children. Actually, at least two things are broken: the software that file sharers use, and the record labels’ business model. The current situation can’t be the final answer. And what happened with music is now happening with movies. When the dust settles in 20 years, what will this world look like? What components of it could you start building now?

The answer may be far afield. The answer for the music industry, for example, is probably to give up insisting on payment for recorded music and focus on licensing and live shows. But what happens to movies? Do they morph into games?

2. Simplified browsing. There are a lot of cases where you’d trade some of the power of a web browser for greater simplicity. Grandparents and small children don’t want the full web; they want to communicate and share pictures and look things up. What viable ideas lie undiscovered in the space between a digital photo frame and a computer running Firefox? If you built one now, who else would use it besides grandparents and small children?

3. New news. As Marc Andreessen points out, newspapers are in trouble. The problem is not merely that they’ve been slow to adapt to the web. It’s more serious than that: their problems are due to deep structural flaws that are exposed now that they have competitors. When the only sources of news were the wire services and a few big papers, it was enough to keep writing stories about how the president met with someone and they each said conventional things written in advance by their staffs. Readers were never that interested, but they were willing to consider this news when there were no alternatives.

News will morph significantly in the more competitive environment of the web. So called “blogs” (because the old media call everything published online a “blog”) like PerezHilton and TechCrunch are one sign of the future. News sites like Reddit and Digg are another. But these are just the beginning.

4. Outsourced IT. In most companies the IT department is an expensive bottleneck. Getting them to make you a simple web form could take months. Enter Wufoo. Now if the marketing department wants to put a form on the web, they can do it themselves in 5 minutes. You can take practically anything users still depend on IT departments for and base a startup on it, and you will have the enormous force of their present dissatisfaction pushing you forward.

5. Enterprise software 2.0. Enterprise software companies sell bad software for huge amounts of money. They get away with it for a variety of reasons that link together to form a sort of protective wall. But the software world is changing. I suspect that if you study different parts of the enterprise software business (not just what the software does, but more importantly, how it’s sold) you’ll find parts that could be picked off by startups.

One way to start is to make things for smaller companies, because they can’t afford the overpriced stuff made for big ones. They’re also easier to sell to.

6. More variants of CRM. This is a form of enterprise software, but I’m mentioning it explicitly because it seems like this area has such potential. CRM (“Customer Relationship Management”) means all sorts of different things, but a lot of the current embodiments don’t seem much more than mailing list managers. It should be possible to make interactions with customers much higher-res.

7. Something your company needs that doesn’t exist. Many of the best startups happened when someone needed something in their work, found it didn’t exist, and quit to build it. This is vaguer than most of the other recipes here, but it may be the most valuable. You’re working on something you know customers want, because you were the customer. And if it was something you needed at work, other people will too, and they’ll be willing to pay for it.

So if you’re working for a big company and you want to strike out on your own, here’s a recipe for an idea. Start this sentence: “We’d pay a lot if someone would just build a …” Whatever you say next is probably a good product idea.

8. Dating. Current dating sites are not the last word. Better ones will appear. But anyone who wants to start a dating startup has to answer two questions: in addition to the usual question about how you’re going to approach dating differently, you have to answer the even more important question of how to overcome the huge chicken and egg problem every dating site faces. A site like Reddit is interesting when there are only 20 users. But no one wants to use a dating site with only 20 users—which of course becomes a self-perpetuating problem. So if you want to do a dating startup, don’t focus on the novel take on dating that you’re going to offer. That’s the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem.

9. Photo/video sharing services. A lot of the most popular sites on the web are for photo sharing. But the sites classified as social networks are also largely about photo sharing. As much as people like to share words (IM and email and blogging are “word sharing” apps), they probably like to share pictures more. It’s less work and the results are usually more interesting. I think there is huge growth still to come. There may ultimately be 30 different subtypes of image/video sharing service, half of which remain to be discovered.

10. Auctions. Online auctions have more potential than most people currently realize. Auctions seem boring now because EBay is doing a bad job, but is still powerful enough that they have a de facto monopoly. Result: stagnation. But I suspect EBay could now be attacked on its home territory, and that this territory would, in the hands of a successful invader, turn out to be more valuable than it currently appears. As with dating, however, a startup that wants to do this has to expend more effort on their strategy for cracking the monopoly than on how their auction site will work.

11. Web Office apps. We’re interested in funding anyone competing with Microsoft desktop software. Obviously this is a rich market, considering how much Microsoft makes from it. A startup that made a tenth as much would be very happy. And a startup that takes on such a project will be helped along by Microsoft itself, who between their increasingly bureaucratic culture and their desire to protect existing desktop revenues will probably do a bad job of building web-based Office variants themselves. Before you try to start a startup doing this, however, you should be prepared to explain why existing web-based Office alternatives haven’t taken the world by storm, and how you’re going to beat that.

12. Fix advertising. Advertising could be made much better if it tried to please its audience, instead of treating them like victims who deserve x amount of abuse in return for whatever free site they’re getting. It doesn’t work anyway; audiences learn to tune out boring ads, no matter how loud they shout.

What we have now is basically print and TV advertising translated to the web. The right answer will probably look very different. It might not even seem like advertising, by current standards. So the way to approach this problem is probably to start over from scratch: to think what the goal of advertising is, and ask how to do that using the new ingredients technology gives us. Probably the new answers exist already, in some early form that will only later be recognized as the replacement for traditional advertising.

Bonus points if you can invent new forms of advertising whose effects are measurable, above all in sales.

13. Online learning. US schools are often bad. A lot of parents realize it, and would be interested in ways for their kids to learn more. Till recently, schools, like newspapers, had geographical monopolies. But the web changes that. How can you teach kids now that you can reach them through the web? The possible answers are a lot more interesting than just putting books online.

One route would be to start with test prep services, for which there’s already demand, and then expand into teaching kids more than just how to score high on tests. Another would be to start with games and gradually make them more thoughtful. Another, particularly for younger kids, would be to let them learn by watching one another (anonymously) solve problems.

14. Tools for measurement. Now that so much happens on computers connected to networks, it’s possible to measure things we may not have realized we could. And there are some big problems that may be soluble if we can measure more. The most important of all is the defining flaw of large organizations: you can’t tell who the most productive people are. A small company is measured directly by the market. But once an organization gets big enough that people on in the interior are protected from market forces, politics starts to rule, instead of performance. An improvement of even a few percent in the ability to measure what actually happens in large organizations would have a huge impact on the world economy, and a startup that enabled it would be entitled to a cut.

15. Off the shelf security. Services like ADT charge a fortune. Now that houses and their owners are both connected to networks practically all the time, a startup could stitch together alternatives out of cheap, existing hardware and services.

16. A form of search that depends on design. Google doesn’t have a lot of weaknesses. One of the biggest is that they have no sense of design. They do the next best thing, which is to keep things sparse. But if there were a kind of search that depended a lot on design, a startup might actually be able to beat Google at search. I don’t know if there is, but if you do, we’d love to hear from you.

17. New payment methods. There are almost certainly things whose growth is held back because there’s no way to charge for them. And the people who could implement solutions don’t realize how much demand there would be, precisely because this growth has been held back. So pretty much any new way of paying for things that’s easier for some class of situations will turn out to have a bigger market than its inventors expected. Look at Paypal. (Warning: Regulated industry.)

18. The WebOS. It probably won’t be a literal translation of a client OS shifted to servers. But as applications migrate to servers, it seems possible there will be something that plays a central role like an OS does. We’ve already funded several startups that could be candidates. But this is a big prize, and there will probably be multiple winners.

19. Application and/or data hosting. This is related to the preceding idea, but not identical. And again, while we’ve already funded several startups in this area, it’s probably going to be big enough that it contains several rich markets.

It may turn out that 4, 18, and 19 all have the same answer. Or rather, that there will be things that answer all three. But the way to find such a grand, overarching solution is probably not to approach it directly, but to start by solving smaller, specific problems, then gradually expand your scope. Start by writing Basic for the Altair.

20. Shopping guides. Like news, shopping used to be constrained by geography. You went to your local store and chose from what they had. Now the space of possibilities is bewilderingly large, and people need help navigating it. If you already know what you want, Bountii can find you the best price. But how do you decide what you want? Hint: One answer is related to number 3.

21. Finance software for individuals and small businesses. Intuit seems ripe for picking off. The difficulty is that they’ve got data connections with all the banks. That’s hard for a small startup to match. But if you can start in a neighboring area and gradually expand into their territory, you could displace them.

22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid. People often use Excel as a lightweight database. I suspect there’s an opportunity to create the program such users wish existed, and that there are new things you could do if it were web-based. Like make it easier to get data into it, through forms or scraping.

Don’t make it feel like a database. That frightens people. The question to ask is: how much can I let people do without defining structure? You want the database equivalent of a language that makes its easy to keep data in linked lists. (Which means you probably want to write it in one.)

23. More open alternatives to Wikipedia. Deletionists rule Wikipedia. Ironically, they’re constrained by print-era thinking. What harm does it do if an online reference has a long tail of articles that are only interesting to a few people, so long as everyone can still find whatever they’re looking for? There is room to do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica.

24. A buffer against bad customer service. A lot of companies (to say nothing of government agencies) have appalling customer service. “Please stay on the line. Your call is important to us.” Doesn’t it make you cringe just to read that? Sometimes the UIs presented to customers are even deliberately difficult; some airlines deliberately make it hard to buy tickets using miles, for example. Maybe if you built a more user-friendly wrapper around common bad customer service experiences, people would pay to use it. Passport expediters are an encouraging example.

25. A Craigslist competitor. Craiglist is ambivalent about being a business. This is both a strength and a weakness. If you focus on the areas where it’s a weakness, you may find there are better ways to solve some of the problems Craigslist solves.

26. Better video chat. Skype and Tokbox are just the beginning. There’s going to be a lot of evolution in this area, especially on mobile devices.

27. Hardware/software hybrids. Most hackers find hardware projects alarming. You have to deal with messy, expensive physical stuff. But Meraki shows what you can do if you’re willing to venture even a little way into hardware. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in hardware; you can often do dramatically new things by making comparatively small tweaks to existing stuff.

Hardware is already mostly software. What I mean by a hardware/software hybrid is one in which software plays a very visible role. If you work on an idea of this type you’ll tend to have the field to yourself, because most hackers are afraid of hardware, and most hardware companies can’t write good software. (One reason your iPod isn’t made by Sony is that Sony can’t write iTunes.)

28. Fixing email overload. A lot of people, including me, feel they get too much email. A solution would find a ready market. But the best solution may not be anything as obvious as a new mail reader.

Related problem: Using your inbox as a to-do list. The solution is probably to acknowledge this rather than prevent it.

29. Easy site builders for specific markets. Weebly is a good, general-purpose site builder. But there are a lot of markets that could use more specialized tools. What’s the best way to make a web site if you’re a real estate agent, or a restaurant, or a lawyer? There still don’t seem to be canonical answers.

Obviously the way to build this is to write a flexible site builder, then write layers on top to produce different variants. Hint: The key to making a site builder for end-users is to make software that lets people with no design ability produce things that look good—or at least professional.

30. Startups for startups. The increasing number of startups is itself an opportunity for startups. We’re one; TechCrunch is another. What other new things can you do?

Consider this list to end with a giant ellipsis. It’s not even a complete list of the types of ideas we’re looking for, let alone of all types of startup ideas. So if you have a great idea that’s not on this list, don’t be deterred. Some of the best ideas are outliers everyone ignores because they seem crazy.

It was an interesting exercise to write out this list. I noticed a lot of similarities between ideas that I never realized were there. In fact, when you read the list, you get a pretty accurate composite portrait of a startup: a combination of relentless predator upon the obsolete and benevolent solver of the world’s problems. As ways of making money go, that’s pretty good. Startups are often ruthless competitors, but they’re competing in a game won by making what people want.
 

Watch this satirical video about web2.0 startups and chill your heels. I could resist laughing after this. Will post about blog..blog..blog…. lines in daytime.

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Tags: bubble, blog, arrington, om