Outsourcing News, Orange County Register outsourcing editing

Orange County Register is carrying out a pilot program of outsourcing copy editing work to India. This one month long pilot program would be on trial basis and the future direction would be determined based on the outcome of this program.

The newspaper business has been struggling to reinvent itself to compete. Now the Orange County Register is trying a new way to cut costs: outsourcing to India.

Mindworks Global Media will copy edit some of the papers stories for a one-month trial starting next week. And a community newspaper owned by the O.C. Register's parent company--it didn't name which one--will outsource page layout to Mindworks, which is based outside New Delhi.

The outcome of this pilot program would be keenly watched by other print publications. With the declining Ad Revenues, the print industry has to re-invent it self and look for cost reduction every where possible.

iPhone India, release date still unclear

The newly unveiled iPhone 3G is going to be simultaneously launched in multiple countries on July 11th. India is amongst the list of countries which are still “wait-listed”

 

As per the last update from Apple,  Bharati is the preferred carrier. Unlike in the US, long tedious contracts are the not the normal and people are used to using unlocked phones. So in all probability, customers will have to fork out the entire cost of the device, probably with a marginal subsidy from Airtel for every new customers.

Google not listed in Google Trends for WebSites

Google just launched a new feature on Google trends called Google Trends for website. Its a very exciting new feature for ranking websites in direct competition to Alexa etc.

But I noticed, google trend for google doesn’t feature the traffic data for google properties like google.com, orkut.com

So comparisons like google.com vs yahoo.com will not work.

Why I downgraded from Firefox 3 ?

With the excitement surrounding Firefox 3 launch, I gave in to the temptation and upgraded to Firefox 3.

To my shock, I realized how much I depended on firefox and how it has become a virtual OS for my daily needs when none of the plugins worked. I use the following plugins daily

1. Grease Monkey
2. Google Tool Bar
3. S3 Organizer for Amazon S3
4. FireBug
5. FireFTP

These plugins are absolutely essential for my work. I have got so used to not installing software , instead installing plugins for Firefox, that Firefox is the new OS and upgrading firefox is like upgrading the OS.

So make sure your plugins are supported before upgrading Firefox.

Now about the downgrading process. Un-install Firefox 3, then download the previous version of Firefox from Mozilla releases website.

When I just installed the release 2 over the existing Firefox 3 release, the browser just wouldn’t open up. It kept on crashing. So make sure you un-install the existing Firefox 3 installation and then install firefox 2. The only saving grace is, all the plugins are intact, inspite of the un-installation process.

Update : One of the readers  pointed out that FireBug works in Firefox 3, but it the automatic update doesn’t do the job.

firebug does work in FF3 you just have to go to the Firefox add-ons page and get it from there. For some reason the updater doesn't do it.

1000 Files limit in Google Appengine is very restrictive

While Google Appengine is a giant step for smaller companies to host scalable applications there are few things which make it totally not practical for building serious application.

There is a limit of 1000 files per application.  Add a few libraries and one hits the 1000 files limit.

Google's response

We encourage developers to find creative ways to reduce the number of files in an
app. For example, a zip file with many small files is much more efficient than many
small individual files. 

Well learning to work around Google Appengine's limitations in itself requires quite a bit learning curve and creativity. Add to this 1000 file limitations, it makes more sense to go with other hosting provider and use Amazon S3 as a scalable storage solution.

Google develops products in an iterative manner and I hope these limitations would dealt with in the future.

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage down ?)

Connections to Amazon S3 are timing out consistently since yesterday. Can't get to the status dashboard either.

I get this page not error when I try connecting via the browser.

 

Surprisingly my website, which uses Amazon S3 is working fine.

Update: Well looks like the issue is not limited to S3. Even Amazon website is down. Been down for the past 1 hour, since I first noticed it.