Memeorandum now features images and tabloid.

Had been using Memeorandum for keeping a tab on what's happening in the technology front and on political front. If your are suffering from information overload and want to know what the blogosphere is buzzing with, Memeorandum fits right in for such a task. You can find the major buzz for a day in 5 minutes by looking at Memeorandum. Now Memeorandum features an automatic dirt digger called WesMirch ( a tabloid tracker of sorts) . You can think of this as Google news of the blogosphere. There are a few others trackers which are doing similar stuff like tailrank, megite, chuquet etc. If you want to know more about memeorandum, this post at techcrunch is a very good starting point. Memeorandum has today introduced a new feature which adds images in addition to text, much like Google news.

Tags: Memeorandum, Tailrank, Wesmirch

Riding solo to the top of the world

Taking a break from technology, this post is devoted to my other passion "Motorcycling". Gaurav Jani's documentary "Riding Solo to the top of the world" wins the top honors at the MIFF (Mumbai international film fest). It won the Nation critics award and the Golden Conch for the best documentary at MIFF.

Riding Solo To The Top Of The World is the unique experience of a lonesome traveler, who rides his motorcycle all the way from Mumbai to one of the remotest places in the World, the Changthang Plateau, in Ladakh, bordering China.

Situated at an average altitude of 15,000 feet, Changthang covers almost 30,000 square kilometers of Ladakh. A land devoid of roads and with temperatures that dip to minus 40 degree Celsius in winter.

Gaurav is very well known in Indian Biking community and he started 60kph motorcyling club, which is an all India motorcycling club that takes biking to the extreme and dare to go where no other man or wheels dared to go. All members ride the Royal Enfield Bullet, which they consider as a fellow traveler than a machine. Riding Bullets sometimes has its own disadvantages like reliability but most riders know their machines inside out and all always ready for a quick fix if the bike breaks down.
What is incredible about the documentary is that it has been shot by Gaurav all alone, with no camera man or other stuff. So you can actually re-live his experience through this documentary.
I haven't myself seen the documentary, since its not out yet. There were couple of screenings in India for the members of biking community and Gaurav is still trying to find a suitable buyer for the film. Discovery, Nat Geo are you listening ? The reaction for the documentary I gather from the fellow riders is just one word "Speechless".
Heard the soundtrack of the movie and its just amazing. It is very apt for the theme of the movie, "Riding Solo". For some idea about the terrain in Ladakh, here are a couple of teasers from 60kph.

Update : Gaurav has now put a teaser of the documentary up on the website. You can watch it here .

Here is the youtube video

Tags: Motorcycling, Riding Solo, 60kph, India

Google Writely in talks ?

Om is reporting on a rumor about Google and Writely in talks for a possible acquisition. My first reaction is this doesn’t feel like a very sound idea and might fizzle out.

1. I have doubts about AJAX scaling up for complex spreadsheets or other office applications.
2. Secondly Google has tie up with Sun for open office, it should be pushing for xforms , not a AJAX based office suite. Open Document format can natively support xForms.
3. Mozilla is working on Xforms extension (they released 0.4 build recently) and I used it for a few complex forms. RIA can be built better using this than AJAX alone.

In case Google is acquiring writely, then I see it more like a technology acquisitions rather than an application that can be shipped anytime soon. And if they are looking at providing office applications online, then why leave out spreadsheets? Are they acquiring numsum too? And can I cut data from Numsum and paste it in tabular format in Writely? Ray Ozzie was talking clipboard's yesterday.

Besides handling browser crashes, network failures, offline editing capabilities are critical. So in case they are going to provide an online editor, its critical to provide offline too. This is where open office is needed. You can edit offline and sync online etc, since underlying data is all XML.
I am sorry but writely, numsum etc are technology demonstration projects, and they are not usable applications yet!! Look how long it’s taking Google to get a calendar out of the door? Complex applications like office will take far more effort. We might be looking at years here.

Update: Om's speculation was right, from the Google official Blog.

Tags: xForms, Google, Open Office, Web2.0

Google theme for Firefox browser ?

A followup to my last post, about re-designing the browser and the leaked presentation from Google. If anybody from Google is reading this, take a look at what the folks from Glaxtar are doing. Glaxtar has developed a firefox extension to provide a personalized web experience by replicating browser settings, bookmarks etc across every browser user logs onto. A few things Google can derive from this

1. Add Glaxtar like features to Google Toolbar for Firefox. So users can have same Google/Firefox experience on every PC and at the same time Google can deliver personalized content.
2. Single sign-on and quick links (or quick launches) to different applications to ensure user sticky-ness.
   
3. Add xForms extension to the toolbar, so RIA Applications can be delivered over the web. Complex documents can be created and stored online.
4. Add notifications extension to firefox
5. Default Firefox to use tabbed browsing
   

Tags: Firefox, Google Browser, Glaxtar, xForms, Web2.0

xForms extension for FireFox

Mozilla foundation has released the xForms extension version 4.0 0.4 for Firefox. There are couple of great sample forms you can test after installing the extensions. The advanced insurance form and the SVG enhanced tax form shows the strength of the xForms specifications. For knowing more about xForms, you can find the book Introduction to XForms: XML Powered Web Forms by T.V.Raman very useful. If you are wondering why I am blogging about this, well xForms allow to you create complex multipage forms, without server roundtrips. Combine Ajax and xForms and you can create complex functionality over the web. The xForms specification is platform independent, so it would work as well in a laptop as it would in a mobile phone. OpenOffice also uses xForms technology for document markup and document creation. Sometime back there was an announcement about SUN-Google partnership about OpenOffice and in case they are working together to create a usable Office application over the web, then it might be based on xForms.
Besides xForms can allow server side state maintenance using Ajax , so in case the browser crashes while the users are working on a really large form or document, the state can be recovered by the xForm state stored in the server.

Tags: xForms, Ajax, Web2.0, Open Office, Google, Sun

How good is Microsoft Live

Have guest authored a review on Microsoft Office Live on Om Malik's Gigaom.

Tags: Web2.0, Office Live, Microsoft

Re-designing the browser ?

Geeking with Greg has text from presentation of Google's Analyst day. More than the concept of "Gdrive" what caught my attention was this little piece

For example: Firefox team is working on server side stored state but they want to store only URLs rather than complete web pages for storage reasons. This theme will help us make the client less important (thin client, thick server model) which suits our strength vis-a-vis Microsoft and is also of great value to the user

Server side stored state would be great and would change the nature of applications that can be developed and which depend on browser for delivery. But the biggest concern is privacy. Does this mean the browsing history would be stored on a centralized server? Does this mean, every user will have an online "temporary internet files" folder which Google would use to harness for personalized content.

Tags: Firefox, GDrive, Google, Web2.0

Indian movies should be available on Google Video

As an Indian expatriate staying in the US, it gets tough at times to find the movies that one would want to see. With the launch of google video and its reach, the Indian movie producers and distributers have a great chance for moving their content in "pay per view" format to Google Video. I know a lot of my friends who pay like $10 or more for a monthy subscription to host of illegal sites for watching hindi movies which are streamed online. This is a great opportunity which is right now being wasted by the Indian Producers. There is a huge market out there for Indian movies, but the problem is accessibility. Even the theatrical releases are limited to new movies and only on weekends. Besides the new movies, the Indian diaspora is left starved for desi entertainment and Indian movie producers can leverage the platform such as Google Video for exploiting this potential. I am sure, people would prefer to watch, legal, good quality prints online for a fees of say $3.00 per movie rather than watching camera prints of movies. The library of Indian movies is huge and the past hits which are now on DVD, etc can be made available via Google Video. Besides the movie producers don't have to worry about DRM since all that is taken care by content enablers like Google Video.

Tags: Hindi, Movies, Google Video, DRM, Streaming, Indian Movies

SocialText, free for 5 users or less

Have been a big fan of socialtext since the day we used socialtext for broadband wikiproject initiated by Om Malik. There were around 40 of us from across the world, who got together on this platform to gather information about broadband across the world. It worked very well with absolutely no training and we got all that data together on the wiki. Ross Mayfield mentions about a new pricing model for SocialText.

Free for 5 Users: your workgroup gets unlimited wikis
Free for Open Source Projects: your community gets the power of mass collaboration

So if you have a project which requires collaboration and are sick of zillions of email exchanges, IM's and conf call. Give this a shot, its worth it.

Tags: SocialText, WIKIS, Collaboration