I was very tempted to start reading my rss feeds which I read through Google reader and set up my google account.  The reading experience was not very bad but when you compare to flipboard and The daily, you would hate it.

So I started looking for an app which could use my existing google account and give me a great reading exp. I was able to find MobileRSS which pulled feeds from my google account including my bookmarked posts.

It has been great reading experience on mobile rss and I would definitely recommend it. The best part is price : Free.

amazon-android-App-Store

This is close to on heels of Launching Kindle development Kit , which was in limited beta.

They are waiving $99 program fees for the first year which is a very welcome move.

What is the criteria for approving apps ?

Nothing has been said in this regard but my guess is that they will stay away from pornographic and controversial apps. Of course they would not block apps like google voice !!

This could be more beneficial to developers because

1. Amazon’s brand name and recognition

2.Millions of new and registered users who daily visit amazon

Amazon can help market the web apps through the related items. for eg if you are purchasing an ebook or hardbound on Java certification , amazon could show related apps below in “Frequently Bought Together” or “Sponsored Links”

app add on amazon

This is my thought and could very well happen as they have started selling 3rd party items and advertisers can market on Amazon.

I am not sure if in future , would kindle start integrating apps although for now it is strictly an ebook reader. Wild Imagination ..yes but who would have though few years back that eBook and Tablet would become such a rage.

I see content and application converging sometime in future.

Update : If you are looking to submit your app to amazon , here are step by step instructions Submitting your android app to Amazon Appstore

Look at BookBrewer.

How it Works: Import posts from your site or blog, or copy/paste from a manuscript. Edit content and drag it into chapters and boom…the boom is ready.

You can start selling your ebooks with them as well. Pay $89.99 to send your eBook to online stores with your ISBN or one we assign for free, or $199.99 to get an ePub file to do with as you wish.

AWS Free Usage Tier (Per Month):

• 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
• 750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing*
• 10 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 1 million I/Os, 1 GB of snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot Put Requests*
• 5 GB of Amazon S3 storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*
• 30 GB per of internet data transfer (15 GB of data transfer “in” and 15 GB of data transfer “out” across all services except Amazon CloudFront)*
• 25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage**
• 100,000 Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service**
• 100,000 Requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications and 1,000 email notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service

  **
  

In addition to these services, the AWS Management Console is available at no charge to help you build and manage your application on AWS.

This is really a good deal especially for developers who will want to try out Google and Amazon web services before making a decision.

Why has amazon doen so ?

Google is coming out with new features for it App service.  Recently Google announced partnership with Spring.

Amazon is trying to get some more customers with their freemium model.

Here is quick comparison between two and which one suits you best.

WordPress

This is one the most popular blogging platform and you should use if you satisfy the following conditions:
1. You want to “just blog”, and don’t want to mess around with programming code, website design and the like.
2. You are satisfied either with the default theme (appearance) provided by WordPress, or can find a WordPress theme from a third party that suits your requirements.
3. You are a solitary blogger – you don’t need support for separate blogs on one website, where there are different people posting to different blogs.
4. There are literally thousands of free plugins and themes for wordpress. The community surrounding Wordpress really does an outstanding job with this. Drupal doesn’t quite have as many plugins (called modules in Drupal) and themes to go around.

In fact you have a plugin for every functionality you might wish like integrating with flickr, job listings , traffic estimate. You just name it.

5. Out of the box installation. Nearly all hosting providers provide support for wordpress.

Personally, I feel that WordPress is probably a good choice for most casual bloggers. It particularly excels if you are a newcomer to web development, since the default setup is perfectly usable if you are not too fussy.

And best part , wordPress is free.

Drupal

Designing your site to look and behave the way you want it to with Drupal, however, will probably be a daunting task for many people. Don’t undertake it unless:

1. You know CSS and HTML. If you only know how to design web sites using WYSIWYG web editors.
2. Knowledge of PHP is mandatory.
3. You are willing to devote time to deciphering the Drupal source code. (Remember, this is someone else’s code, so deciphering it takes more time and effort than figuring out your own.)
In addition, don’t be deceived by appearances – it may appear as though you can configure a Drupal theme by simply modifying (or creating) some theme files. However, you will soon find that some features can only be supported or suppressed by going through the other files in the Drupal core modules. In other words, there’s no clean separation of things in the Drupal source code — to change or support particular features, you will have to go through many files that are all over the place.

To sum up, use Drupal if:

1. You need support for multiple blogs and multiple authors. Drupal’s built-in support for this is superb. Note : Wordpress MU has made it possible to support multiple authors with built-in multisite support. Not tried it yet though.
2. You don’t need to implement your own theme or template, or you don’t mind spending time to figure out the Drupal source code and have the programming (PHP) and designing (HTML/CSS) ability to do it.
Drupal is also free.

Do not overlook the fact that wordpress has become the blogging platform for Microsoft and Adobe.

As on July 2, 2010, there were 100 million downloads of wordpress plugins and still counting.

If you are looking for something popular , easy to use , low cost and working with distributed teams, you should go either with CVS or SVN.

Here is quick comparison of various VCS used . This is a result of survey done in 2008 by finalbuilder.

Soucre control surver

Looking at the results, you would surely go with SVN but one should look at why SVN is getting more popular and is taking over CVS.  SVN was created to fix some problems in CVS.  

Here are some major differences :

1. Repository basis

CVS is based on RCS files of versions control. Each file connected to CVS is an ordinary file containing some additional information. It is quite natural that the tree of these files repeats the file tree in the local directory. Thus, with CVS you should not be anxious about data loss, and you can easily correct RCS files if necessary.

The basis of SVN is a relational database (BerkleyDB) either set of binary files (FS_FS). On one hand, this settles many problems (for example, concurrent access through the file share) and enables new functionalities (for example, transactions at operations performance). However, on the other hand, data storage now is not transparent, or at least is not available for user interference. That is why the utilities for “curing” and “recovering” of the repository (database) are provided.

What does this mean ?

CVS repository files are rcs-format files that you can easily understand and manipulate with a text editor. SVN repository files appear to me to be opaque blobs. If the file system gets partially corrupted, you may well be better off with CVS.

2. Tracking history

CVS only tracks modification file by file while SVN tracks a whole commit as a new revision, which means that it is easier to follow the history of your project. Add the fact that all modern source control software use the concept of revision so it is far easier to migrate from SVN than it is from CVS

3. SVN supports versioning of binary files

4. SVN adds transactional commit (all or nothing)

5. Subversion doesn’t distinguish between file system space and “branch” space; branches and tags are ordinary directories within the filesystem.

In CVS, branches and tags are different things. A tag is a label for a revision. They are pretty useful for things like marking a RELASE tag for files to sync to your webserver.

Branches live in the same ‘namespace’ as the main file — it’s easy to track down all the mods of a particular file.

6.  Subversion can’t look at a file and tell you at what point someone created a branch or tag from it. Tools like CVSGraph can use this information to draw a tree of a file’s history. To do that with Subversion, you’d need to search all the branch/tags directories, and I haven’t seen any tools that do this well

7. You can move or rename files or directories cleanly in SVN

7. Commits are change sets on the whole tree (not just histories on individual files)

This post Subversion for CVS users can help answer your questions

Here is another link in wiki comparing CVS and SVN.

Updated : Subversion named sole leader in the Forrester 2007 Wave Report for standalone SCM
http://www.collab.net/forrester_wave_report/index.html
“Subversion’s strengths are scalability, administration, and geographical distribution. Subversion’s ability to scale to meet enterprise needs is well established, with single instances managing 7,500 users… Subversion is also easy to implement and administer: Subversion customer references reported initial implementation times of less than a month and administrator-to-user ratios of better than 1:1,000”, writes Carey Schwaber, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, The Forrester Wave: Software Change and Configuration Management, Q2 2007

Sounds pretty exciting huh !!

So let us dump what we have and start developing in HTML5.

Nope not so fast . Hold on to your hour horses. Yes it is true that HTML5 is becoming the new standard . But at this stage neither all the browsers are ready for HTML5 , nor the clients would be ready with new browsers. So you might have a new website/application built in HTML 5 , using new tags but the clients are still with IE6 !!

You do not want to land in this situation.

Aditya Yadav’s  interview on Info q Deploying HTML 5, talks about some of issues around this new standard and he has put together an excellent table detailing compatibility level of each browser with HTML5 features.

For $40 million , Prometric has done a very lousy job.  When students went in to take the exam on 28 Nov, the servers crashed. And not all of the 250,000 students were taking the test. It was only 20% of them.

The students who took the online Common Admission Test, some of them were not quite convinced about the new format of the examination. And their fears had come true.

Well 50,000 stduents concurrently taking test should not be a rocket science . Compare to ebay , Amazon and twitter which handle multiples of traffic every minute. Looks like prometric did not even bothered to conduct a pilot run.

No update on when the service will be restored and if IIM can afford to have this kind of glitch again.

They had tried to find a solution to this in house and had spend some time and resources but without much luck. So they they threw this challenge for people  to come together and solve this problem. The grand prize of US$1,000,000 was reserved for the entry which would best Netflix’s own algorithm for predicting ratings by 10%

You can read the details about the problem from wikipidea

This challenge although is not the first one in which companies had thrown open the problem to a group of people or team but the amount at stake was very high this time. This is an example how crowdsourcing is being used to create innovative solutions. In the coming years we will definitely see the growth in this kind of approach where in companies can use social platforms like facebook and google wave to find solutions to complex problems.

On September 21, 2009 Netflix awarded the $1M Grand Prize to team “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos” .

Netflix challenge winner

The Complete report can be found at Media Post

Now this data along with other news abut click fraud on face book , would not sound sweet to ears of those who are paying for google adwords or facebook ads. There was another story on techcrunch Facebook Click Fraud 101.

I think the way to combat the problem is performance based ads.  Companies like google and facebook should get paid only if some transaction happens. The banner ads can help in getting brand awareness but this is good for only big companies or those who have big budgets. A small medium to size business is more interested in getting revenues in order to sustain long enough for the brand to be recognized.