There is an article today in techcrunch about SMS based answering service Cha Cha in US , able to generate revenue

ChaCha Makes Its Crazy Business Model…Profitable.  The post explains how Cha Cha is able to make revenues by sending ads in the sms when a user asks questions and through adsense on their website.

There has been a interesting discussion in which a user pointed to SMS based answering service 63336 in UK which had explored this option but decide not to do it. Read this Why 63336 doesn’t include adverts in its texts.

There is another SMS based service in India SMS GupShup , which sends you SMS and generate revenue through  ads. Here is a post on techcrunch about it .

SMSGupShup (India’s “Twitter”) Grows To 20 million Users, $150,000/month Revenue

This post was nothing but crap about Gupshup making $150,000 a year but again brings back to question SMS  services driven by Ad – Good or bad idea

I tend to agree that SMS based services would not work only on advertising alone and do not find much logic in Cha Cha’s business model. In countries like US you have to pay for even reading a SMS , until and unless you are in some kind of plan so you also do not want to be spammed with multiple SMS for one question you asked. Companies like AskmeKnow in US failed badly . Look at their numbers In the 12 months to 31 December 2007, its last full year of trading, AskMeNow managed to generate an income of USD60,000 whilst incurring expenses of USD20,980,000.

And do not forget that location based services in smart phones answers a lot of your queries. So one side prices are going down for Cha Cha and other providers but the competition is also heating up.

It is a matter of time before we find out whose business model works out best and are consumers willing to pay for such services.

I am picking this from 6336 blog “It is quite easy to get a lot of customers by giving everything away for free. The real test is making money”

JDK 5.0 and above have come up with a convenient method to extract Array from a  Collection without typecasting

<T> T[] toArray(T[] a)

The java doc says “Returns an array containing all of the elements in this set; the runtime type of the returned array is that of the specified array.”

Usage :

Assume you want o extract the arrays of gurus .

Collection<String> guruCollection = new ArrayList<String>();

Read more…

Are you aware of this scam going on social networks and various other sites where in they ask you to take a quiz to compare your IQ with Miley Cirus or take a personality test . The user take the quiz  and at the end is asked to enter his/her phone number to see the results.

Most of the unsuspecting users just give their phone numbers without reading the fine print.In the fine print is the clause that you are agreeing to a charge of $9.99 being applied to your phone account on recurring basis.  Once you enter the phone number and say yes, you get to see the results of quiz and an additional charge of $9.99 in your bill which you might miss.  The parents of the teen age kid might dismiss this is some extra charge on kids phone and continue to pay unsuspectingly. Read more…

In this post I will explore the common causes of performance issues in database , optimizer statistics , table/index statistics  and table maintenance

Common Causes of Performance issues in Database:

• Database Design : Poor system performance usually results from a poor database design. Consider partitioning, creating materialized views, proper indexes, etc.

• Poorly written  SQL : In about 80% of the cases, this is the cause of the slowness of the queries and load operations.

• Memory : Improper shared pool, buffer cache, log buffer sizes, can consider pining large objects to memory or creating stored outlines.

• Disk I/O : Database files needs to be properly sized and placed to provide maximum disk subsystem throughput. Also look for frequent disk sorts, full table scans, missing indexes, row chaining, data fragmentation, etc

• Database Contention: Study database locks, latches and wait events carefully and eliminate where possible. Read more…

Skill-Guru has added Cisco CCNA Certification practice test (640-802 CCNA) to its repository. The test includes questions on following chapters 1) ACLs 2) Bridges & Switches 3) Ethernet Networks.

Take the test and give your feedback.

Hey Skill-guru users , do you know Google is coming out with Google guru ? Is this same as  yahoo answers ?

May be not because google had earlier this service called google answers which was not very successful.  We are seeing this version in Thailand Thailand Google Guru . We will wait for this to be rolled out in US in English.

Transaction: Transaction simply means a unit of work, which is atomic. If only one step fails, then the whole unit of work fails.  When we consider database, Transaction groups a set of statements/commands which gets committed together. If a single statement fails, whole work will be rolled back.   Transactions can be described using ACID criteria. Read more…

Aspects Oriented programming(AOP) is another way of programming in Spring. Instead of Object oriented programming, in which the key unit is class , in AOP the key unit is aspect.

AOP framework is part of the Spring and comes bundled with it. No additional installation is required. Spring AOP is implemented in pure Java and can be used in a web container or enterprise server. Before we move ahead with an example , let us look at some terminologies which we will be using in this application

• Aspect: a modularization of a concern that cuts across multiple classes. Transaction management is a good example of a crosscutting concern in Java EE applications.
• Join point: a point during the execution of a program, such as the execution of a method or the handling of an exception. In Spring AOP, a join point always represents a method execution.
• Advice: action taken by an aspect at a particular join point. Different types of advice include “around,” “before” and “after” advice. (Advice types are discussed below.) Many AOP frameworks, including Spring, model an advice as an interceptor, maintaining a chain of interceptors around the join point.
• Pointcut: a predicate that matches join points. Advice is associated with a pointcut expression and runs at any join point matched by the pointcut (for example, the execution of a method with a certain name). The concept of join points as matched by pointcut expressions is central to AOP, and Spring uses the AspectJ pointcut expression language by default. Read more…