Did Yahoo acquired Indian startup... "Bookpad"??

I saw lot of news coming which says Yahoo acquired Banglore based Indian startup called as 'Bookpad'. But Yahoo press release does not confirm this yet(22nd Sep 11.30 am :) ).

Waiting for official news.. Of course Indian startups are being recognized in world but other part of story could be Indians are not holding it for long to be more successful.

Anyway,
Some highlights about 'Bookpad'

• It is a one year old startup
• Started by yet another IIT engineers
• Based in Banglore
• Company name is Bookpad, product  name is DocsPad
• Bookpad is working with digital contents
• Bookpad had build a end to end document handling technology for the cloud
• They have offices in India as well as USA

Indian Entrepreneurs, Startups & Funding

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) ranked number four in producing Entrepreneurs, beating many Universities in USA. 2 week back I read this news. It was a pleasant and proud feeling.
India has been contributing to world of Information and Technology from many years, but this contribution is for service industry. There are no substantial  'Product' companies in India which made 'Impact' in the field of Information Technology. But these high quality Entrepreneurs coming into the race will definitely change the future for India.

Today I saw another news by National Entrepreneurship Network(NEN) which highlighted 4 Indian startups which raised millions.
The startups are:

• MeraEvents.com
• Redbus.in
• Freshdesk.com
• UrbanLadder.com

Ref:
http://blog.pitchbook.com/the-top-50-universities-producing-vc-backed-entrepreneurs/
http://www.nenonline.tv/3-indian-start-ups-who-raised-millions/

How to speed up your browsers, especially firefox

Internet Browsers are the most used softwares these days.. We use browser not only for browsing Internet, but to watch videos, to play games, to listen songs, to code, we run many applications through browser and so on..
 Thus we always want faster performance and smooth functioning of our browser. Following are some of the tips to make sure improve your browser performance.

• Always  keep the browser to latest version, but only after reading the review of newer  version by experts
• Do not keep installing  all the plugins you come across
• If you are always online kind of person, clear your cache (only cache not the form data or history) at the day end
• Increase your cache size from browser in the proportion of your RAM
• You can make use of about:config option to configure your firefox(warning: Its risky, do not try if you are not an expert)
• Use different browsers for different type of sites.. e.g. keep your professional mail account and links related to it in firefox, open your facebook or picasa in chrome
• Some tweaks using about:config
• Type "about:config" into the address bar and press enter. search for following strings and change their values as given here
         find and Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
         find and Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"
         find and Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number e.g. 25. It means it will make 25 requests at once.
• Right-click in browser window and select 'New' -> 'Integer'. Lable it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.

Google +

Google is trying to get social like facebook....

Thus they come up with a 'new' (??) product in their list.. which is called as "Google +". I tried this 'Google +' for few hours and what I see is functionality is same but google has changed the way they do it.. e.g. instead of 'Groups', 'Communities' etc on other sites they have come up with a different concept like 'Circle'.. This is good in terms of design, appearance and the way we use it.. The word 'Circle' relates more to the certain groups e.g. we say my college circle, my friend circle, my sports circle, my social circle, my study circle etc.. So +1 to google for this.. :) and the +1 button itself.. we use this sign in mails, mailing lists, forums etc.. which relates us directly with the concept. 


The concept of 'stream' is very much similar to 'wall' in facebook, profile view of Google + is almost same as that of facebook, they could have done some improvement over here.. e.g. there is +1 button, there are friend suggestions, there are status updates, there are link to go to your friends, account settings, circles etc.. Only one area of improvement is to have bigger profile picture with high resolution. This is where I will give +1 to facebook.

Another thing which I do not like about this Google + is it is fetching all the data from your connected google products e.g. blogspot, gmail, picasa etc.. which is killing privacy. I would like to keep my friends and friend circle different than my professional circle..

Anyways I know that, google will surely come up with many more modifications and additional functionalities in this. So will keep writing about those in future..

Trip to Matheran

I visited Matheran few days back. It was my first trip to Matheran with my wife. The atmosphere and surrounding lives upto its reputation. Enjoyed the trip. still.. there are few suggestions for the Matheran Municipal Corporation and Maharashtra Government which would be great help to other visitors. Also I have few tips for the first time tourists.
Suggestions:

• Could not see any location map in Matheran, I have seen "You are here" type of Maps at many locations in Konkan, this could be big help to tourists to find various 'Point' locations
• There are some direction boards but those are not at all readable
• Mode of transport is only horses and 'Baggi' pulled by humans, which creates lot of dust and its very difficult to walk on those roads. Some provision must be made to avoid this.
• Its a very good move of not allowing vehicles at Matheran, but government can introduce some solar vehicles which can be taken on rent by tourists. This could be really good option to horses and Baggis
• Its very funny that vehicles are banned to control pollution but plastic bags and cans are not banned, though there are boards which say that, "plastic are banned and if someone spreads plastic garbage there is fine of Rs.50/- to Rs.500/- " But still every shopkeeper uses plastic bags, plastic mineral water bottles, cold drink cans etc.. which are creating non-disposable garbage at this beautiful hill station.

Tips for First time tourists:

• if its Summer, don't to Neral station to get the toy train to go to Matheran, this is not the best option. The train journey in Summer is very boring and its time consuming too..
• Instead hire a car and go to Dasturi Naka (Taxi stand of Matheran). From here you have to walk or take a horse to go to your hotel.
• Get a good pair of shoes (even ladies) because its very hard to walk in Matheran with slippers or floaters or sandals etc.. Many girls prefer fancy sandals and they cannot walk over there, and then they have to purchase some shoes over there.
• Get some scarfs to protect yourself from red dust. When a horse pass by your side it throws lot of dust.
• Don't worry about lifting your luggage, you will get many coolies over there.

Please do not carry any Plastic, if at all you have any Plastic material with you PLEASE DO NOT throw it on the hill station.

So thats all I can share with you. Keep sharing your experiences after your visit.

Be aware about some Facebook Applications

To all Facebook lovers and Facebook addicted people...

These days many FB apps are sending chat messages to the friends in your list, be aware of these apps as they might just want to use your personal/private data.. 

when you install any application you give right to the application to access your private data.. which is BAD.. Many apps like "who viewed ur profile" can be dangerous.. Sometimes these applications send messages to your friends on your behalf, access your and your Friend's private data (for which they have set privacy setting "Friends Only") and use the information for commercial purpose.

I have also seen some applications post some porn links on your profile which may damage your social image. If at all you see any link posted on your profile which is offensive please remove the link immediately and if you see any application connected to this link then remove the application too.

In the next blog I will write about some more privacy settings tricks of Facebook..

Have a Safe Browsing and Happy Facebook life.. :)

What is Cloud Computing?

Everyone is talking about cloud computing these days. Let the person be IT or non-IT everyone is using this phrase, some of them know what it means some of them do not know. Let me explain to those who do not know.

Let us start with the word Cloud. Cloud has no shape no size, you do not know what exactly lies behind the cloud you are looking at, this is called as Abstraction in IT language. 

What was the need of cloud computing?
Human being started barter system in old day, reason was to exchange the goods you have with the goods others have. Later on people started exchanging  for food, shelter, clothing. This is also called as resource sharing. because i have something in excess i can share it with someone and get something in return. This was origin of could computing concept.

These days many companies have servers racks. which are not used at their full capacity. Many times servers are idle. To make use of this idle time and to get some ROI, companies decided to rent out their computing power for others for some limited time.

There are many companies in non-IT domain who want to use IT services but do not want to invest heavily on the IT infrastructure and maintenance of that infrastructure. So.. these companies started using infrastructure of above mentioned companies for some fees.

Obviously there are more companies in the world who want to use these services than the companies who have already invested in infrastructure. So some more companies started creating infrastructure to provide only cloud computing as service.

This sharing idea can be also implemented as subscription. Thus there are 3 variations of this cloud computing idea.
1. SaaS (Software as a Service)
2. PaaS (Platform as a Service)
3. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)

Will write more in next blog..