SEARCHANDISING

How to know what is on your customer’s mind?

How to efficiently sell a good?

How do provide satisfactory services to the customer?

How to make profit?

Above are the few questions that would come to your mind if you are an e-tailer.

Searchandising could be one of the many solutions.

This term comes by combining : Search+Merchandise= Searchandise!!!

Coined by Matt Roche, CEO of software provider Offermatica, this amalgam helps the e-merchants increase their sale and provide better customer satisfaction by integrating their store with its search effectively. This is a statistical and analytical tool which helps in understanding the customer better and providing better services.

So how does it work?
It takes the searches of customers who visited the website in past as input and combines them together in a complete package to give statistics on the successful results, failed results, results that ended in sale etc. . Thus it helps in using the website search data to improve the service and result in better profit.

How to implement?

Have a great search or navigational scheme on the website. The faceted search is most recommended.

Use consumer search data to marketing strategies and influence results.

Understand the keywords that gave in void or failed results and eliminate them or assign them to their closest match.

Drawback:

From a consumer perspective such fancy technologies may not be fun. For example, the recommended products from giants like Amazon, is depended on your previous purchase in most of it you would not be interested as you already have it.

Good or bad, surveys say it works!!!

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is one of the vague topics to be explained in just a paragraph. Basically one can define it as a process of makinf one's webpage appear in all different search engines. In today's context it has been one of the important aspects of web programming. I am just writing down the few steps needed for search engine strategies and it includes:

1. Writing a page title of your web-page
2. Writing a decsription and keyword META tag so that when the user type something to search in the search engines, the robot can catch the page that matches the keyword.
3. Including your keywords in Header Tags H1,H2,H3.
4. Make sure your keywords are in the first paragraph of your body text
5. Use keywords in Hyperlinks
6. Make Your Navigation system Searh Engine Friendly
7. Submitt your webpage URL to seacrh engines and you can do this by visiting the search engines website and adding your website URL there.
8. Fine-tune with search Engine Optimization
9. promote your local Business in the interennet.

These above mentioned are the facts that needs to be considered if you wish to be indexed by the major search engines like google, msn, yahoo etc. If we also can implement all these strategies on our upcoming project I am sure we will be able to promote it very easily.

We have to understand the fact that developing website is not just our goal...... promoting it can take a good amount of time and hard work

“Think Outside The Box”

“It’s time to think outside the computational box” is an (abstract) article published in communications of ACM, November 2007, on how can a computer “compute” the “uncomputable”.
PHEW!!!
No points for guessing, I could not comprehend the essence of the theory discussed except for the phrase “THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX”(I could connect better with taco bell’s punch line think outside the bun).

So, I decided to write a short blog on this phrase and how important is it to implement it as aspiring entrepreneur. It is also an extension of Dr. Raghavan’s blog on “Inspiration for Ideas”

I realized this phrase is commonly used in business and corporate sectors to pursue employees to do “better than their best”.

• What is implied by thinking outside the BOX?
• How to think outside the BOX?
• How does it help?

To begin with let us understand “What is thinking INSIDE the Box?”
In 1899 Charles H. Duell, Director of the US Patent Office, said, "Everything that can be invented has been invented”.

If you see, in today’s perspective this statement was clearly short sighted. There have been numerous inventions, discoveries since 1899. This is a small example of thinking inside the box or not being a visionary or being myopic and conventional and extremely mundane.

Thinking outside THIS box, therefore can be described as to leave the safe route and be different, not to be a myopic and be adventurous. Thinking outside the box or taking an unpredictable step is essential requirement for becoming a good entrepreneur and grow into a Tycoon.

How to think outside the box? Ed Bernacki, in his article gives the following essentials attributes for being ‘able’ to think outside the bun:

• Willingness to take new perspectives to day-to-day work, to challenge the
assumptions. It is extremely important to be able to identify the
ASSUMPTION.
• Openness to do different things and to do things differently.
• Focusing on the value of finding new ideas and acting on them.
• Striving to create value in new ways.
• Listening to others.
• Supporting and respecting others when they come up with new ideas.

How does it help?
When Charles H. Duell said everything already been invented, he was true for today. People have seen it all, used it all and there is everything that they need within their reach. So, why should they be interested in something you are trying to sell?
There you need the knack to move, intrigue and convince audiences who may become your loyal customers.
Just make sure “ITS DIFFERENT!!!!”

Michael Michalko - more inspiring examples to think differently

Following the fashion

Google is really an amazing and fascinating company. The general performance of her search engine may be the best among the competitors. Except this, she not only continues offering various interesting services, but also publishing the APIs of these services to user. Those open sources absolutely provide great convenience for programmers. Certainly, the other magnates such as Yahoo, Microsoft also have shown their friendliness. If we just ignore such convenience at hand, …what a pity!

Not long ago, when Dr. Wu discussed with us, he recommended me to survey some released API that may be helpful for the course. Hence I opened code.google.com and enter an interesting little world. Now Google has provided: Android- AdWords - Blogger - Deskbar - Google Desktop - Earth - Froogle - Gmail - Google App Engine- Google Book Search APIs - Google Base Data API - Groups - Maps - News - Search Appliance - Talk - Video - Web search- YouTube Data API….

For example, using Google map api, we can integrate Google's interactive maps with data on our site. Google ajax search api can help us put a Google Search box and result on our own site. You also can introduce Google checkout api to start selling on your website. If you are interested in details, please check this link: http://code.google.com/more/#products-products-base

We know that the speed of Google’s machines is very fast. The distributed architecture of Google makes the response time very short. People worldwide can visit Google without watching their time impatiently. So if Google API can be used to build your web services, you will be satisfied on the efficiency and stability.

I am making my efforts to advertise for Google.

~~~~just kidding. Anyway, it seems a fashion that everybody talks about

MY IDEA

Blog marketing is the term used to describe internet marketing via web blogs.
blogs differ from corporate websites because they feature daily or weekly posts, often around a single topic.
Typically, corporations use blogs to create a dialog with customers and explain features of their products and services.
what is a blog?
"Blogs are web sites that allow you instantly publish content about a certain topic or theme."
difference then between a web site and a blog?
A regular web site is designed to publish content for all manner of reasons.
Regular web sites are static and infrequently updated.
Blogs are instant publishing tools that allow you easily update your content often.
Blogs are said to be dynamic content delivery systems and even content management systems.
Blogging tools:
there are a few blogging tools
1.Wordpress
2.Blogger
from wikipedia..

MY IDEA:

1.To create a blog website with other applications.
2.The blogs written in our website will be given ranking.(incase we get sponsers prizes will also be given)
3.While writing a blog if the blogger wants to search a related topic we will provide him the search engine there itself.
4.We will even provide the opportunity for the blog viewers to visit the profile of the blog writer.
5.We create a messenger(instant ) in it..

uses of our blog website:
:People can write blogs.
:They are viewed and rankings are given.
:With the help of an instant messenger, when a person logs in to write a blog or view a blog, If incase he finds a blog similar to his topic he can even visit the profile of the person chat with him if he is online or send an offline message.
:He can discuss his blog and share his ideas with people having similar ideas.
:There can be groups of people chatting over the same idea or discussing over the same topic.

This is my idea and feel free to comment on this please.If any modifications are required or if u have anything else to say please do say it.

The Internet and Software Distribution

It used to be that to distribute software meant spending a lot of money. There were costs associated with advertising, packaging and the act of physically distributing the software itself. In The Fourth Age of Software Distribution, Paul Kafasis lays out the history of software distribution and describes how it has become increasingly more efficient through the years. He points to the Internet being the third age of software distribution with it being eclipsed by the recent iPhone App Store model in which the Internet is the backbone of the method of distribution.

The software marketing and distribution playing field has been leveled due primarily to the Internet. It has allowed any person or company with little to no budget to actively and levelly compete with people or businesses many times their own size. Since its accessibility is near universal, there is little to hinder making products or information about the products available to the potential users. The cost to market and distribute the software has basically been lowered to the cost of a connection to the Internet.

The Internet also caused a big shift in the way software was presented. In contrast to the model of having a user install the product on their computers, there is more and more software that is becoming stored, maintained and accessible from a central location. This allowed the software company to retain greater control over their product giving them the ability to more rapidly fix bugs, deploy new features and provide the user with the benefit of accessing their data from many locations. It also allowed the companies to maintain a continuous revenue stream from the users rather than a one-time payment from the sale of packaged software. The term Software as a Service has been coined to describe this type of distribution.

It is clear that the Internet has played a vital role in the evolution of software distribution and will continue its role for a very long time. The fact is that any software developer now has easy access to millions of people worldwide whereas this luxury used to be available to only the largest of companies.

FBML in Facebook Application

We can use Facebook Application as a service provider, a web-based game or an entrance of some other services. We can use multi-languages to develop applications, C++, Java, Php, Asp.net, Phython, C# and so on, almost include all the main trend programming languages. Facebook provide their official Client API Library to Java and PHP. But they dropped their support for the Java Client Library in the middle of this year, which really disappointed me. For other languages, there are unofficial support libraries to develop and to deploy.

FBML is Facebook’s markup language. Similar with HTML and XML, FBML uses pairs of tags to render dynamic data into the application. It excludes some HTML features, but in other aspects, it is an extension of HTML. We could use FBML to define web pages in Facebook application so that the applications could be in control and restricted in proper rules that Facebook wants. This is a very important part of Facebook’s open source strategy.

FBML could be regarded as a role of an interface, between real service provider and Facebook server. Official sites gave the point that FBML would be a good choice for users who chase the better performance of their applications. When users get information of the Facebook applications from Facebook Server, Facebook server uses FBML to communicate with the real back service provider. After the service provider deal with the user requests, it through FBML to send the dealed data back to Facebook server. Finally user could get the data they want and maybe something else from the Facebook server.

There are so many sites and webpages that provide develop guidelines to new users. But the official documents are not well organized for high level developers, which are mostly complained by developers. But I think we could still find some useful information among those docs or from other developer websites.

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/FBML
This is the Facebook official develop sites to provide information about FBML. Here we can find more specified information include valid HTML elements, FBML tags and usages, and other related material links.

Risk Management

To start up with my first blog, I got to really put more thought on my mind. At last I came up with a topic " Risk Management ".
There is a Web based definition of Risk Management which goes this way: Risk management is a structured approach to managing uncertainty related to a threat, a sequence of human activities including: risk assessment, strategies development to manage it, and mitigation of risk using managerial resources. I would rather define it as managing the crisis situation or lending a helping hand in times of extreme failures or system crashes by using the available resouces at hand. For proper risk management we probably require 6 utilities.
1) Identification of risk
2) Planning
3) Mapping it according to the customers interestslders
4) Defining a framework an setting agenda
5) Developing an analysis
6) Mitigation .

Thus, Risk Management is one of the extreme factors in the companies progress.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_management

Web Marketing

Marketing in any business means the way of promoting your business, your products and make the customer like your product. It is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational goals.In any organization, marketing plays a vital role. We may design and develop our project successfully but what if we are unable to promote it, what if we can't sell our products to the world.

Before starting the process of marketing we have to have the concept of it. We have to know who our end users are, who will buy our products, in what way will it can win over the existing products, how can we make the visitors visit our site. We have to take under consideration every single factor before staring the marketing process.

As our project will be a web- based project, the main marketing strategy behind this will be making it appear in all the main search-engines. Extraordinary contents, writing a descriptive page title for each of the page,writing a decsription and keyword META TAG which uses the main keywords and keyphrases of the page,submitting our page URL to search engines,exchanging links, advertising with google, writing blogs, submitting our site to web directories, sending offers to visitors etc are the main factors that are needed to be considered.

If we are able to develop a site that has the good contents and is technically sound that incorporates the above mentioned facts I am sure our project will be extraordinary. I might have missed some points that are needed for web- marketing and I will explain the rest of the factors on my presentation which I will be doing probably next week. Any suggestions and comments on this will be higly appreciated.

So guys lets make it simple, start planning and start working

Be a Great Employee!

A student life and professional life is little different. I been through this transition from a student to an Employee. But now, again am a student but thats is a different story.

This blog will help you to know few things, that you should keep in your mind while working with an organization.

1) Values - For an any organization values are very important. Employees are an organization's most important asset. I can say employees are the face of an Organization. As an employee we should preserve this values. We represent the organization. We should always behave in a good conduct even when we are out of the organization. It affects the image of the organization.

I call it as a term called 'Extended Workplace'. When two of more Employees of the same organization meets outside in public, its still called an Extended Place. During this time you should take extra concern of your conduct towards public. Your conduct greatly Effects the reputation of an organization.

2)Be a great Team player:

Keeping a good relationship with the team members & your managers is one if the most important factor we should keep in mind while working. We will people from different walks of life, from different culture, different countries. We should respect their views and values. We should always do constructive criticism, if any.

Without Teamwork, we cannot achieve much. When you have a great relationship with your Team, your work becomes much easier. It improves the communication & in turn the productivity. Imagine you have a great project, but when you have poor relationship with your Team members, you cannot communicate properly , hence you cannot put your full effort.

If you are a good Team player, even though when the project assigned to you is hectic, you will not feel the pressure of work since you are having a great time with your Team members and enjoy working together.

I personally felt this when I worked in an organization. I really enjoy the company of my Team, we used to play, share & yes of course do our job.

3) Work together :

Projects have a deadlines and this is one of the most important responsibility of an employee to do their work in time without compromising the Quality of work. When we work, we should not think from an individual point of view. Always think from an Organizational point of view.
This means we should not work for sake of working. we should always keep in mind that you are serving your customer. This will in turn makes you more responsible and improves your productivity.

4) Fun :

All work and No play makes jack a dull boy. You would heard this as a proverb. But This is very true in an organization. This is a great source refreshment . You become relaxed and you can start all new & fresh. This greatly improves the productivity of an employee.

There are many things you will learn when you join an organization. Hope this will help you even in a small way in becoming a good Employee, more than that a good Human being.

Always keep in mind, enjoy what you do & do what you love to do.

Inspiration for your ideas- Part 2

On September 6th, I wrote a blog about idea generation and in it I promised a follow up. Unfortunately, the 'tomorrow' I mentioned has taken a longer time than I expected :-(
Hope not too many of you were holding off on your ideas- waiting for some more inspiration.

I have two kinds of materials to cover. First, is a set of quotations from Linus Pauling, who won two noble prizes- first in Chemistry in 1954 and the other for Peace in 1962. Most of the quotations I use here come from an interview that begins at:
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/pau0int-1

1. My success in solving scientific problems I think is the result of two qualities that I have.
- One is that of being able to formulate or discover problems.
- The other is that of being able to make a decision as to what problems I might be able to solve, and which I probably will not be able to solve, so that I don't waste time on those.

2. ... psychologists have said that my IQ is about 160, I recognize that there are one hundred thousand or more people in the United States that have IQs higher than that. So I have said that I think I think harder, think more than other people do, than other scientists.

3. I had one short course in organic chemistry, but I'm considered to have made great contributions to organic chemistry. I had no courses in biochemistry, but I'm usually described as "the great biochemist Linus Pauling." You see, I have made contributions to biochemistry. There were no courses in molecular biology. I had no courses in biology, but I'm one of the founders of molecular biology. I had no courses in nutrition or vitaminology. Why? Why am I able to do these things? You see, I got such a good basic education in the fields where it's difficult for most people to learn by themselves. ... but when it comes to these other subjects, I was able to learn enough about these other fields just by reading because my basic understanding was so great that I could interpret the sentences that I read. I can read ... books, medical books about heart disease and understand what the authors are saying.

4. Sometimes I say you shouldn't think that your efforts, your demonstration, participation in peace walks or writing letters to members of Congress or to the local newspaper are wasted efforts. You can contribute and you can't be sure how great your contribution is, but you can contribute, so do it.

5. How can a young person be happy? I think a good way of increasing the probability of leading a happy life is to do two things. First, to think about what you'd like to do, whoever you are, what you like to do, and then see if you can make your living doing it. Second, look around, keeping your eyes open and your brain working and find somebody of the opposite sex with whom you enjoy talking and with whom you can get along. Get married young and stay married. ... That, and take plenty of vitamin C, and they will be on the right track (the last sentence was actually a question by the interviewer to which Pauling essentailly answered yes and explained the importance of sound health practices).

6. The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

Also very interesting is the answer Pauling gave to the question, "How have your best, or most productive ideas, come to you? Do they come via dreams, concentrated thought, or relaxation?"
In short, Pauling answered that often his original ideas have come as the result of training my unconscious mind to think about a problem. You may read further details of his answer from http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v12p229y1989.pdf

I believe this is a very important problem on its own right to investigate- how to tap into the extrodinary human capacity for problem solving that remains dormant for most part of our lives (i.e. all of the times that we are awake and sleeping!).

Coming to the second part of this blog, I want to briefly talk about the work of Howard Gardner. Gardner has developed a model of creativity, explained in his book, 'Creative Minds' (1993, p. 360-363). He studied the life and ways of several creative individuals and identified several commonalities. His study found these individuals lived a long, helathy lives, followed new interests vigorously following the 'Ten-Year rule,' were highly motivated and passionate about the work they were engaged in, exhibited 7+ intelligences, -- which included the intrapersonal, the logical/mathematical, the visual/spatial, the musical, the verbal/linguistic, the bodily/kinesthetic and the interpersonal -- and conformed to the portrait of the 'Exemplary Creator' painted by Gardner.

In the article titled, 'Linus Pauling (1901 - 1994),' [http://www.users.muohio.edu/shermalw/honors_2001_fall/honors_papers_2001/Lowrey_LPauling.htm] Anne Lohrey analyzes the life environment and charcteristics of Pauling and shows that Pauling fits the Gardner's model of creativity superbly. Below is a quote from Lohrey:

"Linus Pauling was a master and maker with extensive abilities and a wide range of intellectual strengths in the different intelligences. This may have better enabled him to do the work that culminated in two unshared Nobel Prizes and a host of other awards and honors. He was not content to rest on his laurels, however. ... Additionally, he seems to provide evidence for the ten-year pattern among highly creative individuals. He also fits Gardner's description of the Exemplary Creator fairly well."

By the way, I got interested in Gardner's model and came across the following book by him, titled 'Creating Minds: An Anatomy Of Creativity As Seen Through The Lives Of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, And Gandhi.' The reviews on the book were interesting to where I have a ordered a copy of it, which should arrive in a day or two. If I can read enough of it quickly, my next blog may be a follow up on this article. On second thought, I am more interested at this time in learning about microformats and their potential relationship to the semantic Web; may be it is time just to press on, will see.

A challenge or an opportunity, thoughts from crisis on Wall Street

A day after the historic takeover of AIG and two days after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, people of the world knew that the clouds of financial crisis are covering the sky of Wall Street. Meanwhile, the investors of high tech domain are concerning whether Silicon Valley can withstand the strike coming from Wall Street.

Now on the blog website “valleyWag”, 5 tech companies, on which the financial crisis are making a strong impact, are listed bellow:

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.


My question, now, comes out:" whether the financial crisis would bring new entrepreneurs a total bad luck or if there are some good opportunities?"

Absolutely, in the worst time period, getting the loan from the bank is very difficult, and fewer people will be interested in your products and services because of the shortage of the money. However, everything has two sides. Before the crisis, new small enterprises have many difficulties to enter the market due to the squeeze of the big business conglomerate. However, after a crisis, the tide of the unemployment would bring a blast of start-up of business. Hence, many opportunities may appear during this period.

Let me give you a good example:

Many people in Asia would not forget the Asia Financial Crisis in 1997. It once made the economy of Korea stagnant. Not long after, in order to walk out of the hobble, the government began to fully encourage the development of personal business, especial university students' innovative undertaking by providing various favorable financial strategies. Meanwhile, the gov actively supported innovative and high-tech projects. An investigation of 2003 from Japan said, 71% Korean undergraduates wished to establish their own business. This percentage ranked the first in the world at that time. Now, eleven years after the crisis, the economy of Korea is in a nice state. (The year before last, Korea became one of advanced countries.). Many medium and small business had undoubtedly provided great power to help the recovery of the economy. From the case of Korea, I think, there must be good opportunities for many new enterprises during /after a crisis. The key point is how to find a way or place to dig the gold.

P2P Wiki

I recently read a paper in ACM WikiSym 2007 on Distributed Peer-to-Peer Wiki Network*. The idea was interesting as the present wikis follow centralized client-server architecture and some organization (e.g. Wikimedia foundation for Wikipedia) is in control of all the data on wiki which means a central point of failure.

The popularity of peer to peer file sharing networks suggests that wikis can also be implemented as peer-to peer networks. This also gives users ability to develop custom frontends and the freedom to present articles in a more content friendly format.

The downside is that a separate application will be required to access or upload data on such a wiki and concurrent versioning issues need to be addressed.

A working prototype was developed by the authors of the paper and it still has to go a long way before it becomes feasible for real world implementation. The concept of peer to peer hypertext has also been suggested to implement peer to peer wikis. But anyway it seems a solution to huge costs of maintaining a large centralized wiki like Wikipedia.

*Morris, J., Luer, C., “Distriwiki: a distributed peer to peer wiki network”, Proceedings of ACM WikiSym, 69-74(2007)

Social network service (SNS)

Myspace and Facebook

The following description of SNS comes from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.
(More details on the website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_service)

Unlike traditional BBS, SNS provide services to users to communicate with friends lively, and through a relatively easy way. Through a bunch of tools. A part of BBS users got tired of fake names, in this background, those SNS sites encourage users use their real name and bring real world friends. Soon those sites become very popular.
In North America, Facebook and Myspace are most widely used social network service website. Myspace, by now has over 200 million registered users and it is increasing in a speed of 230 thousand new users every single day; Facebook was formed in Feb 2004. Within four years, Facebook develops into a large platform that has over 60 million registered users and this number is expected to go through 100 million in the end of this year.
The conception of SNS is in some cases included in these two great websites. Especially Myspace, make use of its current large amount of user information and social resource to attract new comers, and build up new social group. One important motive to use Myspace was looking for new friends, new life circles. On the other hand, Facebook focuses more on the service of communication, and develop into more likely a communication platform. Users of Facebook prefer to put their real social network into this platform. Through exist social network online tools like MSN or Email address list, it’s very convenient to load these data into Facebook database. Thousands of applications developed by third part software developer contribute to Facebook’s communication advantage. So, Facebook becomes a tool, an online software.

ORKUT

Orkut is an online community designed to make our social life more active and stimulating. orkut's social network can help us maintain existing relationships with pictures and messages, and establish new ones by reaching out to people we've never met before. orkut makes it easy to find people who share our hobbies and interests, look for romantic connections or establish new business contacts. We can also create and join a wide variety of online communities to discuss current events, reconnect with old school mates or even exchange our favorite recipes.Before getting to know an orkut member, we can read their profile and even see how they're connected to us through the friends network. To join orkut, simply sign in with our Google Account and we can begin to create our own profile right away. If we do not have a Google Account yet, we can create one in minutes.

Orkut is an other application like Facebook.Orkut is used mostly in countries like India,Brazil and there are a lot other.It is an application which helps you to meet your old friends and also new ones.Its an application in which you create your own profile with an id for your friends to recognise you and then you search for your friends, send them friend requests.Add them and accept any friend requests.You can upload your pictures in it.You can create your own albums.You can upload upto to 2000 pics in a single album and you can create 100 of such albums.

ORKUT USAGE ACROSS THE COUNTRIES:

Main applications of Orkut:
1.You can meet your old friends and new ones also.
2.We can upload our own photos, create your own albums.
3.We can add our favourite videos.
4.We can view others pictures and others added videos.You can upload as many videos as u want.
5.Your videos cn be viewed by others.Albums of your friends can be seen by you and vice versa.
6.You can add applications such as music you like.

How orkut helped me to join in this university:

I joined in the community ULL-2008 batch, then in community of ULL which consisted of all the existing members in ULL.I posted queries about the university and they were answered by the seniors.Clarified our doubts with them.Then came to know the students who are going to join for the same class schedule.Had a get together,met them and we all planned our travelling.We came together.Even we got our rooming before coming here.Friends who Reached here earlier helped us.

Even we can do all these with the help of mail.But Uploading photos and all cant be done.Orkut is not as best as FACEBOOK.It even doenst contain so many applications as Facebook.Orkut is in its developing stage but its helpful to peope like us in so many ways.

CONCLUSION:

MISSION OF ORKUT:

To help us create a closer, more intimate network of friends. They hope to put us on the path to social bliss soon.

Some content taken from orkut Website

Between the academic world and the business world

One thing unique we are trying in this class is to run the class as a company. As we mentioned in an earlier post, we have this company CMPS598 Co. set up. Teachers are now directors; students are employees; some will become officers in near future; we have an advisory board; we are writing business plans; we have production meetings; we try to promote our company ...

I think that we are really experimenting applying business philosophies, rules and methods in an ivory tower.

However, business and academia may be quite different from each other. How about we take this opportunity to use our class as a case study to investigate the resemblance and difference between the two worlds.

For examples,

Resemblance

• Hardworking leads to successfulness.
• Basic protocols of ethics are respected.
• ...

Difference (academia vs. business)

• Students (employees of CMPS 598 Co.) are paying tuitions vs. Usually, employees get paid in a real company.
• The primary goal for students is to learn vs. The primary goal for most employees is to make a living.
• The primary goal for teachers is education vs. The primary goal for directors and managers is to get project well-done.
• ...

Feel free to use the "comment" function for the discussion. Hopefully, our thoughts and discussion will help us to understand our experiment better, and help us not to be lost in transition.

Offline Cloud Computing

After the excellent presentation last week on Cloud Computing I thought I would explore some of the options that are available to help users cope with the differences between online and offline computing. As was pointed out, there is a large trend towards bringing everyday work and data online. What then happens when your Internet connection dies or there is not one available? In all likelihood the online service and your data are completely unreachable.

The next generation of the HTML markup language, HTML 5, is drafting support for local, client-side databases. This newly available form of storage (at least new to HTML) will allow developers of web applications to utilize standard SQL to store and retrieve structured data on the computers of their users. The current generation of HTML only defines one standard way of storing data on the client-side. Cookies are small (maximum size is 4KB) pieces of data stored in a key-value pair that can be written and read by a web server. The implications of having a full fledged local database to store much larger amounts of data will be a huge advancement for web based applications. Imagine having a web application that could work online as normal by continuously sending and retrieving data from a centralized location but that would also work be able to work seamlessly offline by communicating with a standardized local data store. In the offline mode, all work would get saved locally until an Internet connection became available. Any data saved to the local machine would then get synchronized with the central location.

Unfortunately, the HTML 5 spec is still very much a working draft. Furthermore, it was announced last week that the final proposed recommendation will not be ready until 2022. 13 years is quite a long time to wait for such a useful feature. Luckily, that hasn't stopped the more impatient developers from coming up with their own implementations. The WebKit developers have added client-side database storage to their web browser engine. Google has their own version of it through their open source Gears platform. The Gears plug-in can already be used in some Google products including Google Docs and Google Reader allowing documents to be saved and edited locally for the former and caching articles from your feeds for the latter.

There is obviously a large amount of interest in bridging the gap between online and offline applications. With better tools becoming available to make both the convenience of remotely stored data and the comfort of having your data stored locally easier for the developer to manage, I think most users will begin to expect applications to offer the integration of online and offline storage in the applications they use from day to day.

Additional information:
Google Gears developer information -- includes a video presentation

Progress report for CMPS 598 Co.

We have been trying to run this class as a IT startup company. All students are "hired" as employees of the company CMPS 598 Co.; the teachers became the initial directors of the company. We have invited entrepreneurs and experts in different but relevant fields to serve on the advisory board. Many of them will give talks to the class, from different angles, addressing issues that are not covered in a conventional computer science curriculum.

In this starting stage, students individually work on producing several "products" , by writing articles for this blog, by generating innovative ideas for the company to develop in near future, by giving small presentations to the class. We had the first production meeting last week. The progress of our production was reported, issues and problems were addressed. It was decided that our future process will be tuned.


As can be seen from the screen shot of StatCounter "Recent Visitor Map" above, our blog (as one of the products) are having visitors not only from local, but also from California, Canada, and many places in Europe, Asia and South America.

While most of the employees of CMPS 598 Co. are still scratching their head, trying to develop a creative idea, come up with an interesting topic for blog article, or be busy with preparing their class presentations, there are good signs. The first student presentation "Cloud Computing" was really good! There are several really good ideas in development! Also, we are writing better-quality articles for this blog. A 3-person photographer team has been setup to take pictures for recording and publicity purposes.

How to make buzz for CMPS 598

A few visitors from Lafayette Chamber of Commerce will tour the CACS building next Thursday around 5:00pm to 7:00pm. Shall we take this opportunity to promote our class?

Lets have a discussion on how to achieve this ...

Some Useful Working Applications for Facebook

Facebook has now about 1800 apps which bring huge success to this great SNS website. The most popular 10 apps have almost 46 million users.Here is some very useful work-related utility and applications, which make it easy to handle the littles things in the job.

To-Do List
As the name, To-Do List memories the things you should do and the deadline. It's convenient to add tasks, build index, set priority and deadline. To set a deadline, you can write the date or just "tomorrow", the app would know the time.

Calendar
By 30boxes, calendar provide a solution for whole personal schedule management. You can use it to setup what to do and there would be short messages to remind you at the time. Also, it could let your friends know your schedule in the Facebook profile.

Docs
Want to share documents with others or from others? Docs is a file sharing system provided by Scirbd. There are more than 50 thousand files on it. People want to make this app a big pool of "solutions, poems, class notes and other interesting things". Docs also warn users not to use this pool to cheat on study.

Application Developer Services
This application helps to provide Facebook app developer market information to current and potential developers. It make the categories and split the whole market into special parts. App developer can write down their skills and demands, while project managers can find the proper guy to hire into their team.

Lending Club
Projects need funds.This interesting program could help project managers or team leaders find the funds. This is a financial market. Funds would come from other Lending Club users.

Collecting, providing and processing information is the key to web2.0 world. The cost won't be that high like traditional industry. I would continue to explore the interesting and creative features in this area.

Investment Portfolio Management and its Ease

The advent of "Internet" has made the tracking personal finances much more easier. Investment portfolio management is a tool where you can invest as well as keep a track of your investment.
On such portfolio management website is Moneycontrol.com. This website is fairly popular in South Asia. It offers various tools for investors like giving detailed information regarding field stock, mutual fund, ULIPs, bullion, currency, loan, property, wealth levels. It gives instantaneous value of the stock updated from the stock market. It shows return on investment, the percentage gain/loss. It also has a financial news section, gives board meeting schedule, new policy shifts of the government or the market and other trivia that may be of your interest.
It provides a live feed to the current stock exchange levels including a round up on sectoral indices. To divide the investment into their respective sectoral components, the website provides an analysis tool. This tool helps in arranging your investment. They also have a dedicated column for expert analysis and interviews of business leaders or tycoons.

Now you do not understand how all this works?????

No worries!! Your are at the right place. Here you would get all the knowledge regarding financial management under the section called first step. It is a very diligently written section committed to make people aware of financial system.
The website is simple and provides a very comprehensive tool for assets management and monitoring, all one a screen on the geaux…..
Overall it has been a nice experience tracking portfolios even in bear market.
The other similar portals are cnnmoney and google finance.

Web3.0=(4C + P + VS)

Many people had already heard of the concept named Web 3.0. This concept was first introduced by Dan Gillmor in 2005. It is one of the terms used to describe the evolutionary stage of the Web that follows Web 2.0. Since Web 3.0 is still a big concept, which has not been standardized yet, from now on, there are so many definitions for Web 3.0. We can have a look at what is mentioned on Wiki :" Web 3.0, a phrase coined by John Markoff of the New York Times in 2006, refers to a supposed third generation of Internet-based services that collectively comprise what might be called 'the intelligent Web'—such as those using semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data-mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies—which emphasize machine--facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience."

Today, I found an other interesting article, and the author deemed that the formula, Web3.0=(4C + P + VS),is the future of internet. The terminology of this formula are listed below:
3C = Content, Commerce, Community
4th C = Context
P = Personalization
VS = Vertical Search

In Web 1.0, commerce and content had been the driving force, the companies like Amazon and eBay is produced in this background. In Web 2.0, Community became the most popular force and produced company like Myspace, Facebook. At the same period, vertical search, like Sidestep for travel has gained a great deal of investment. In Web 3.0, personalization will be a focus and thus organizing principle of Context will be greatly developed. Internet will be built based on information aggregation and people’s behavior and habit.
I think web 3.0 will replace web 2.o rapidly in the near future. It is destined to bring us a considerable number of opportunities for business. There are some other interesting readings:

• Web 3.0 and CNN Money
• Personal Finance & Web 3.0

An brief introduction to Spring framework

Recently, I read some materials about Spring Framework. So I’d like to introduce some basic information of Spring here.

Spring framework is a wide ranging framework for enterprise Java development, based on code published in Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development by Rod Johnson.

Primary features of Spring, mentioned by Spring team, are listed below:"

• The most complete lightweight container, providing centralized, automated configuration and wiring of your application objects. The container is non-invasive, capable of assembling a complex system from a set of loosely-coupled components (POJOs) in a consistent and transparent fashion. The container brings agility and leverage, and improves application testability and scalability by allowing software components to be first developed and tested in isolation, then scaled up for deployment in any environment (J2SE or J2EE).
• A common abstraction layer for transaction management, allowing for pluggable transaction managers, and making it easy to demarcate transactions without dealing with low-level issues.
• A JDBC abstraction layer that offers a meaningful exception hierarchy (no more pulling vendor codes out of SQLException), simplifies error handling, and greatly reduces the amount of code you'll need to write.
• Integration with Toplink, Hibernate, JDO, and iBATIS SQL Maps: in terms of resource holders, DAO implementation support, and transaction strategies. First-class Hibernate support with lots of IoC convenience features, addressing many typical Hibernate integration issues. All of these comply to Spring's generic transaction and DAO exception hierarchies.
• AOP functionality, fully integrated into Spring configuration management. You can AOP-enable any object managed by Spring, adding aspects such as declarative transaction management. With Spring, you can have declarative transaction management without EJB... even without JTA, if you're using a single database in Tomcat or another web container without JTA support.
• A flexible MVC web application framework, built on core Spring functionality. This framework is highly configurable via strategy interfaces, and accommodates multiple view technologies like JSP, Velocity, Tiles, iText, and POI. Note that a Spring middle tier can easily be combined with a web tier based on any other web MVC framework, like Struts, WebWork, or Tapestry."

NOTES: At the beginning of reading the materials, the feature, which caught my eyes first, was the technique named “Dependency Injection”. The basic idea of the Dependency Injection is to have a separate object that populates a field in the lister class with an appropriate implementation for the finder interface. The advantages is that code in your project can get much cleaner when the dependency injection principle is applied, and a higher degree of decoupling is much easier when beans do not look up their dependencies. Hence, if this technique is adopted in future projects, it might help us a lot to reduce, or even eliminate, a components unnecessary dependencies. In this way, code can be more reusable, testable and readable.