Netflix . the online leader in movie rentals had a typical problem at its hand. It wanted a recommendation engine to recommend movies to its users. The problem statement was “To improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to enjoy a movie based on their movie preferences.”

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% Read more…

For a lot of small business who rely on Google ads to bring them customers , this would not be good news. A report says that only 8% of Internet Users Account for 85% of all Clicks. This is an update to the comScore highly publicized “Natural Born Clickers” research, conducted two years ago with Starcom USA and Tacoda.

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.

The Term JPA- Java Persistence API is also used when referring the Hibernate and we know that the JPA is part of EJB3. Following section gives a brief Idea about the 3 terms and explains how they are related.

Hibernate :

The Object-Oriented Programming is widely used programming techniques to develop any application. Persistence is the basic concept in application development.  Without data saving the applications can do little. The Relational Database Management System is widely used to save/persist  the application specific data. Read more…

Global downturn seems to be taking its toll on all industries. IT industries were also deeply affected by this downturn.

Companies were hoping that recession will end this year therefore most of them honored the offers given to college grads last year.

But looks like they do not have enough work for them. Infosys has doubled the training time for its 18000 freshers which were hired last year. It also assigning them to mock projects in order to give them some real time experience.

While this may not be good enough but at least it is better than sitting idle. This is not good for students  who graduated  this year and are facing a tough time in job market.

Read the complete story here

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.

If I write it down today and say “I always told you so” , you would not believe me. But couple of years back while discussing with my friends and colleagues I was telling them that google has the best chance to give challenge to Microsoft in Operating Systems. It is not that google has best brains(I do not doubt that) but because it is following a very planned strategy. The reason for this was as follows :

When you own a computer , except all the computer game junkies and programmers most of us open up a browser ,surf internet, use MS office suites , email , listen songs or download pictures.

Since google had integrated its own application suite in the web, there was very little use of an Operating system. So why can’t a browser like Firefox(Chrome was not out then)not be installed  on Linux and sold to customers.

So on browser you surf internet , upload and share pictures. For work you can use google office suite which works very well within browser . So you do not need a full fledge OS.  A lightweight linux can be used and you save your $100 which you pay for OS.

And this I was saying before Chrome(Google’s browser ) was released.

Today google has announced they are launching Google Chrome Operating System in second half of 2010.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

Read it here in google blog

Currently they are targeting net book , but no reason why it cannot be upgraded for laptops in coming years.

There is a lot of business learning from this piece of news and with what Microsoft has been doing for years. We will cover that in next post.

These days we keep on hearing that computing is moving towards “Clouds” and how this will make headaches and pains associated with infrastructure and server management thing of the past.. Let us try to look at what really is cloud computing

What is cloud computing ?

Cloud computing refers to term where in a company where instead of running software , applications on in house servers or storing data locally , are doing it on a third party resources which are being termed as clouds.

So what are these clouds ?

Clouds are thousands and thousands of computers connected via internet to each other and these computers are shared by companies to host their application and manage data.

One of the best examples of the cloud computing is salesforce.com which had been working on this concept since long. Another recent example is New York Times which has provided fully searchable access to its 1851 to 1922 archive—more than 15 million articles. This has been achieved without hosting any application on its own servers. They are using Amazon’s Cloud Computing service.

Google’s business suite launched in 2007 has 0.5 million clients and it uses the power of cloud computing by offering the companies and individuals business applications hosted over internet.

Now this would give you a fair idea of what is cloud computing and what is achievable with this.

Some other players who are in the field of offering cloud computing services are

a)      Amazon’s cloud computing

b)      Google App Engine

c)      Sun Microsystems

These companies are now providing cloud services to individuals and companies. One has to sign up then they are given access to their space in the clouds. The developers or application management team can connect to these clouds through various tools and deploy their application.

The price ranges on how much bandwidth is used and what is the traffic on the site.

The concept behind companies selling the cloud computing is that your infrastructure is not always loaded 100% .  So during the times US has its peak load, Europe is just waking up and Hong Kong is sleeping.

When Hong Kong is utilizing 100% load, the peak load is fallen 80% in US.

In this way the resources can be managed much more effectively if they are being managed by a central vendor.

Advantages : One of the biggest advantages of cloud that I see for small to medium sized companies , they do not have to rely on in house server management.

Another advantage is that sudden spikes in load or traffic can be handled by cloud servers with companies having to manage extra servers or anything. They only need to pay for this extra load.

The offerings are reasonably priced for one to try out and google offers free version as of now.

Limitations : Now all versions of hardware have been supported by clouds . Amazon is now offering the open source web server tomcat on its cloud.

Google is also offering deployment of java applications. More information of google app engine supporting java can be found here. (I think it is free)

Sun Microsystems has also has a very goof offering on the clouds. They offer Virtualization in the cloud and also prevent vendor lockout.

Update : I have added a post to demonstrate First Step working with Cloud Computing