I do not buy shoes online. But that does not mean other people also do the same. Zappos.com is an e-commerce retailer that has successfully built a strong online brand and shown impressive revenue growth since its founding. The gross revenue numbers basically speak for themselves: 2000 $1.6M, 2001 $8.6M, 2002 $32M, 2003 $70M, 2004 $184M, and 2005 $370M.

You can read Zappos case Study here

Y’day Amazon buys out Zappos in $807 million deal. Amazon said in a statement that under terms of the deal, it will buy all outstanding shares, warrants and options of Zappos in exchange for roughly 10 million Amazon shares with their value based on average closing prices in June and July. In addition, Amazon “will provide Zappos employees with $40 million in cash and restricted stock units.

Congrats to Tony Hsieh and team and for the invetsors who made it till this time.

I am hoping you would have gone through Introducing Grails and then the Part 1 of this post Setting Up Grails .

Now I am covering the details of developing and running the application

1. Go to command prompt and your grails home directory.
2. Create the application.

• The create-app command creates the full project, with a template with placeholders for the different components of your application such as configuration, MVC, library, and much more.
• > grails create-app   (it will ask for a application name say – first_app)
• Will create basic  view layout as main.gsp page Read more…

Sounds very strange that the company which has been against the open source and dismissed it as a non serious player has taken the route to open source. No they are not giving away all the windows code to open source (some of you would love to have it) but they have submitted 20,000 lines of code to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the Linux tree.

The three device drivers are being released under the GPLv2 license, which is the Linux community’s preferred license.

This comes on the heel of making SilverLight open source. Read Silver Light goes Open Source

Many years ago John Chow started getting steam as a blogger and told Google to goto hell. John sold paid links, paid reviews, and did massive amounts of reciprocal link exchanges to gain tons of back links. All of which fall under the penalty of death under google’s kingdom

John was given the death penalty and completely removed from the Google Index. Many people wrote about this and how Google was owning John and he was done for.

But with banned by google , a strange thing happened. His popularity and brand grew. Now it was the success story of how you really don’t really need Google to succeed on the internet.

Search traffic for john chow was growing but nobody could find him on Google. What people were finding was infringing sites like johncow or notjohnchow who were only getting traffic because they were ranking for John’s name.

Always being creative and realizing that Google penalizes the domain, but not the link, John registered Johnchow.ca and redirected GoogleBot to that domain. Within days Johnchow.ca started ranking for all the phrases that johnchow.com used to. But google did not liked it and within couple days Johnchow.ca was penalized as bad as JohnChow.com.

But looks like JohnChow is back in google search and that too at a very good rank !!

Thanks to ShoeMoney for this post

In one of my post , I had covered about Cloud Computing and the rising popularity. This was the post

Understanding Cloud Computing

I came today at one of the blog post which explains to setup and get your first app running.
Here is the link.

This should prove helpful to the users who want to experiment with cloud computing.

The version of html which we are currently using is HTML and it has not seen a major update in last 10 years although there has been so much development in UI in terms of technology and browsers.

W3C is working on next major release of HTML , keeping in tunes with the times and has released a draft version. HTML 5 defines the fifth major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML

The technical difference can be read from here HTML 5

One of the most important features which I liked about HTML5 was its database specification . This lets a web application create and use a local database, which means it can work without an internet connection, and even more importantly, it’s way faster than before. HTML5 is supposed to be disruptive and is already being used in Google.

Google has demoed the new version of gmail which is in HTML5 . Click here to see the demo

Firefox 3.5 supports HTML 5 audio and video with Ogg Theora

HTMl5 would bring much more power to the web and to the developers who definitely would bring some innovative applications

If somebody would have asked me few days back this question , I would not have known the answer. But I always wanted to find about the technology and tricks used at high performance sites like  twitter , facebook and ebay.

During discussions with one of the colleagues, I came to know that core(the back end services) of  twitter has been written in Scala. And that set me going . Twitter had really high load going to 5000 tweets per minutes at times.

Update : Thanks to the comments posted by users, especially Dave who have informed that the front end has been written in Ruby on Rails.

I really wanted to find out more about Scala and learn about it.

What is Scala ?

Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages, enabling Java and other programmers to be more productive. Code sizes are typically reduced by a factor of two to three when compared to an equivalent Java application.

Many top-notch programmers and industry leaders have already been captivated by Scala. James Strachan even says that scala is the long term replacement of java and javac.

Find more about scala here

I will be covering more about Scala in next post and how is it more efficient over Java.

Common Admission Test also know as CAT,  is the main admission decider used in the selection process for the Indian Institutes of Management, a network of India’s top business schools in Ahmedabad, Bang­alore, Calcutta, Indore, Kozhikode, Lucknow and Shillong. Of the 250,000 students who take the exam each year, just over 1,500 are admitted, making it one of the most competitive admission exams in the world.

Baltimore-based Prometric, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Educational Testing Service, focuses on technology-enabled testing and assessment services with test development, test delivery and data management services. The company delivers and administers more than 7 million tests a year for 450 clients in industries such as education, health care, government and information technology. It offers online testing or use of a network of more than 10,000 test centers in 163 countries.

To handle the CAT deal, Prometric will use its 185 employees in India and add resources, including test development and support staff, in India, according to the company. Prometric began doing business in India in 1997 and has worked with companies in the country such as Microsoft Inc., Oracle Corp., the Project Management Institute and Infosys Technologies Ltd.

Prometric had been in the middle of a strong stretch of growth, with five years of 7-8 percent growth annually. The company was purchased by Educational Testing Service in 2007. Brannick expects continued growth in 2009. This year, the company is also increasing investments in test center security and Web-based services and operations.