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25 Reasons to Be Proud of Indian

palsikar — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 06:56:19 +0000

India is the world’s largest, oldest, continuous civilization.
India never invaded any country in her last 10,000 years of history.
India is the world’s largest democracy.
Varanasi, also known as Benares, was called “The Ancient City” when Lord Buddha visited it in 500 B.C.E, and is the oldest, continuously inhabited city in the world today.
India invented the Number System. Aryabhatta invented the number zero.
The World’s first university was established in Takshashila in 700 B.C. More than 10,500 students from all over the world studied more than 60 subjects. The University of Nalanda built in the 4th century BC was one of the greatest achievements of ancient India in the field of education.
Sanskrit is the mother of all European languages. Sanskrit is the most suitable language for computer software – a report in Forbes magazine, July 1987.
Ayurveda is the earliest school of medicine known to humans. Charaka, the father of medicine consolidated Ayurveda 2,500 years ago.
Although modern images of India often show poverty and lack of development, India was the richest country on earth until the time of British invasion in the early 17th Century. Christopher Columbus discovered America trying to find an alternative way to get to India.
·The art of Navigation was born in the river Sindhu 6,000 years ago. The very word Navigation is derived from the Sanskrit word NAVGATIH. The word navy is also derived from Sanskrit ‘Nou’.
·Bhaskaracharya calculated the time taken by the earth to orbit the sun hundreds of years before the astronomer Smart. Time taken by earth to orbit the sun: (5th century) 365.258756484 days.
Budhayana, was the first to calculate the value of ?pi?. He then went on to explain the concept of what today is known as the? Pythagorean Theorem? He discovered this in the 6th century long before the European mathematicians.
Algebra, trigonometry and calculus came from India. Sridharacharya developed quadratic equations in the 11th century. The largest numbers the Greeks and the Romans used were 106, whereas Hindus were using numbers as big as 10 to the power of 53, as early as 5,000 BCE during the Vedic period. Even today, the largest used number is Tera (10 to the power of 12).
IEEE has proved what has been a century old suspicion in the scientific community, that the pioneer of wireless communication was Prof. Jagdish Bose and not Marconi.
The earliest reservoir and dam for irrigation was built in Saurashtra.
According to Saka King Rudradaman I of 150 BCE, a beautiful lake called Sudarshana was constructed on the hills of Raivataka during Chandragupta Maurya’s time.
Chess (Shataranja or AshtaPada) was invented in India.
Sushruta is the father of surgery. 2,600 years ago he and health scientists of his time conducted complicated surgeries like cesareans, cataract, artificial limbs, fractures, urinary stones, plastic surgery and brain surgery. Usage of anesthesia was well known in ancient India. Over 125 surgical tools were used. Deep knowledge of anatomy, physiology, etiology, embryology, digestion, metabolism, genetics and immunity is also found in many texts.
·When many cultures were only nomadic forest dwellers over 5,000 years ago, Indians established the Harappan culture in the Sindhu Valley (Indus Valley Civilization).
The four religions born in India, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, are followed by 25% of the world’s population.
The place value system and the decimal system were developed in India in 100 BC.
India is one of the few countries in the World, which gained independence without violence.
India has the second largest pool of Scientists and Engineers in the World.
India is the largest English-speaking nation in the world.
India is the only country other than U.S. and Japan, to have built a super computer indigenously.

Tips for New Managers

palsikar — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 11:17:38 +0000

STEP 1 – Understand How Your Role Has Changed

No matter how close your friendships with your officemates have been, it’s time to put up some walls. “If I were managing a colleague I once hung out with, I’d stop doing it,” says Caroline Ceniza-Levine, co-founder of Six Figure Start, a career coaching and consulting firm in New York City. Harsh as this may seem, if you don’t establish professional boundaries, you won’t have the objectivity to supervise effectively.

Patrice Williams, 39, a management consultant from Vallejo, Calif. learned this the hard way. In her twenties, she moved up to team supervisor at IBM, where she found herself managing a salesperson with whom she socialized on weekends. Soon after, her pal began coming to work late, skipping meetings, and neglecting clients, dragging down her sales in the process. Williams soon realized she needed to fire her friend, but she just couldn’t. Ultimately, her boss had to step in. “I lost points,” explains Williams, who says it was hard for her to recover professionally. From that point on, she changed her relationship with direct reports — “I’m personable, but not personal” — and learned to talk to them immediately about performance problems.

A few tips on how to head off awkwardness with former peers:

From the outset, tell everyone on your team how you will evaluate performance. If anyone in the group slacks off or breaks the rules, it will be easier to raise the issue in an objective way. “If it is very clear what you are measuring, you can say, ‘This job requires x, y, and z. I’m not seeing z,’” says Ceniza-Levine.

STEP 2 – Know What You Don’t Know

Many companies fall short when it comes to training new managers, says Shultz. Your bosses won’t expect you to know how to tackle every aspect of your new job from the outset, but they will assume that you will ask for the help you need. So, if your company wants you to take on a legally sensitive task such as giving performance reviews, and you’ve never done it before, don’t try to wing it. Ask for coaching from HR or higher-ups. “Without training, it’s easy for a new manager to overlook the implications of what one wrong thing said can do,” says Shultz. If you can’t get the level of help you need internally, sign up for one of the educational programs at the Society for Human Resource Management, which runs educational programs in many cities, he advises.

STEP 3 Master the Unwritten Rules

If you’re new to a company, understand that no matter how similar the culture seems to others you’ve experienced, it is going to have its own unique and sometimes bizarre quirks. “Learn how things get done — both the rational and irrational aspects of it,” advises Nat Stoddard, chairman of Crenshaw Associates, an executive coaching firm in New York City, and author of “The Right Leader: Selecting Executives Who Fit.” Listen carefully when colleagues volunteer tips on, say, the best time of day to approach a senior manager, and pay attention when they tell stories about the office. At the same time, says Stoddard, don’t get too inquisitive. “If you are overly interested in learning something, they will wonder, ‘Why? What’s your motive?’” As you build your new colleagues’ trust, they’ll volunteer more details.

It’s easy to cut yourself off from a vital pipeline if you always eat lunch alone, a common rookie mistake. Curt Braverman, a veteran manager who worked for 25 years at Pitney Bowes, realized this early in his career, when a colleague finally pushed him to grab a bite and proved to be a font of useful information. “If they’ve been around a while, they’ll give you a hint of what’s coming up and can give you some tips that will make your job easier,” says Braverman.

STEP 4 – Be Loyal, to a Point

Be careful about seeming too closely aligned with any one person — even your direct boss, says Stephen Viscusi, CEO of the New York-based executive search firm Viscusi Group and author of “Bulletproof Your Job.” The best job-protection insurance, especially as a newbie, is to remain as neutral as possible on controversial issues, he says. If your boss asks for a point of view, run through the pros and cons of a decision rather than answer directly.

Should your manager ask for your support at a meeting, offer it, but remain as neutral as possible when you’re at the conference room table. If the boss buttonholes you later to ask why you didn’t speak up more, you can say something diplomatic, like “Maybe I wasn’t emphatic enough,” Viscusi suggests. Remember that your boss could be gone tomorrow — and you could be working for the person whose point of view he opposed. “You have to be a little Machiavellian,” he says.

STEP -5 Build the Support You Need to Get Things Done

Showing your bosses that you’re ready to take on new projects isn’t just a matter of stellar performance or demonstrating initiative — though these things certainly help. You also need to prove to the top brass that they can trust you in subtler ways. Many new managers over-explain to direct reports why they must take on a particular task and in doing so, pass along information from their bosses that was better kept confidential. To establish trust with your supervisor, err on the side of keeping your conversations quiet and, when in doubt, ask if the content is for general consumption. “You’ll be on the hook for sharing that information,” says Ceniza-Levine.

You’ll also gain points by acknowledging that your bosses are privy to certain information that you don’t have. Say, for instance, that you ask your boss if you can hire two more people but she says “no.” Rather than step up your lobbying, ask if there is a reason for her opposition that she can share, or, perhaps, one that she can’t disclose to you right now, suggests Stefanie Smith, principal of Stratex Consulting, an executive coaching firm in New York City. You never know — the company could be considering an acquisition that will fulfill that requirement, says Smith.

Even with solid backing from the top, you won’t be able to get anything done if your team isn’t behind you. This often means building support among longtime or more senior workers — including some who wanted your job and didn’t get it. You won’t win any allegiance by reminding them that you have an MBA or that your last gig was at an even bigger company. Meet with each member of your team individually to learn about his background and ask for advice on upcoming projects. “Let them know you’ll be relying on their expertise,” says Andrea Nierenberg, principal of The Nierenberg Group, an executive training and consulting firm in New York City. You don’t have to act on the advice they give you, but listening carefully will go a long way toward building the good relationships you will need to succeed.

New Rules of Social Networking /Social Media

palsikar — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:29:37 +0000

If you aren’t using social-media sites to tap into career and business opportunities in today’s tough economy, you should be. A survey released in January by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that more than one-third of all Americans now have profiles on social-networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, up from just 8 percent in 2005. And it’s not primarily kids, either: The average LinkedIn user is 40 years old; most Twitter users are now 35 and older; and people from 35 to 54 now represent the biggest group of users on Facebook. “You get access to people via LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter that you can’t get in other ways,” says Sharon Rich, founder of outplacement consulting and coaching firm Leadership Incorporated. “I think it’s mandatory to be on there.”

Social-media sites can become a time suck, so you’ll need to limit the time you invest in them each week. But done right, social networking is a powerful way to build your professional reputation, find out about job opportunities, and keep abreast of the latest news and gossip in your industry.

1 ) Build a Powerful Profile on LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s business-only focus makes the site popular with successful professionals (so far, the site has 43 million members in more than 200 countries), so it’s the best place to start your social-media push. LinkedIn’s large amount of traffic also means that your profile there is likely to be the first thing that potential employers and clients see when they google your name, so it’s important to invest some time in building a strong profile. “Why not tell the story your way?” says Randy Hain, managing partner of Bell Oaks Executive Search in Atlanta. Hain knows firsthand the value of a good profile: He recently signed a client (who will do an estimated $100,000 to $200,000 worth of new business this year) when the client searched for Hain’s LinkedIn profile after reading an article he wrote in a trade publication.

Checklist

How to Shape Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn

Seek out recommendations from past bosses, key clients, colleagues, and direct reports to create a 360-degree picture of your strengths. Tell them that you’ll be happy to do the same for them.
Instead of a generic job title at the top of your profile, such as “Owner of John Doe and Associates,” use a short description of valuable credentials that you can quantify, such as “20-year veteran of $100 million in high-tech mergers,” advises Chris Muccio, author of the book 42 Rules for 24-Hour Success on LinkedIn.
Fill out the “Interests” section with pursuits, such as charitable projects, that reinforce your value to potential employers and clients.
For consistency and branding, use a good head shot of yourself as your photo, and use the same photo on other social networks, advises Megan Hendricks, director, employer relations at the College of Business at the University of South Florida.
Opt for a free vanity address for your profile that uses your full name, such as linkedin.com/in/janedoe, so colleagues can find your profile easily.

2) Use LinkedIn Tools to Research Potential Opportunities

LinkedIn’s profiles of more than 360,000 businesses and organizations can be used to gather invaluable intelligence on job openings and opportunities. Start by entering your target company’s name in the search bar at the top of the page and specifying “Search Companies” to find its LinkedIn profile. From there, you can see the names of current employees that are in your network, job openings, the names of recent hires, employees who have left the firm, and even the top feeder company and the most popular next employer among those who have left.

You can also choose to “Search Answers” on the name of a particular firm to see questions its employees have posted for other members to answer, their replies to other questions, and Q&As that mention the company. These pages can provide useful information on the corporate culture or current challenges the company is trying to solve that will help you with your cover letter and interview strategies.

To find out about unadvertised job opportunities, try contacting people you know at the target company, including those who are second- or third-degree connections (to contact them, you’ll need to get an introduction from your mutual contact first). If your network is small and you don’t know anyone at the target company, consider upgrading to a paid business account on LinkedIn, which starts at $24.95 a month. With one of these accounts, you can contact anyone on the site directly, although there’s a limit on how many people outside your network you can contact per month. When contacting strangers, it’s a good idea to browse their profile and see if there’s any common ground in either their work or personal interests you can point to that will make your initial message warmer.

Another way to expand your network is by joining LinkedIn discussion groups pertaining to your industry and becoming active in posing and answering questions. Bill Snyder, 42, recently ended a long job search by answering a question on LinkedIn about which were the best conferences for meeting the heads of nonprofit organizations. The question turned out to have been posted by the founder of a start-up called We-Care.com, who then invited Snyder to a lunch the next time he was in town. One month later, he offered Snyder a job as the company’s general manager.

3) Tweet Your Way to Greater Visibility

Twitter is a fast-growing “microblogging” site that lets you send out frequent 140-character messages (“tweets”) to a network of people who have opted to follow you, as well as to follow the updates of anyone in your network. Many professionals use Twitter to send short bits of useful information, such as business tips or links to interesting articles, to help build their professional visibility and make new contacts. The trick is to make sure you limit yourself to messages that are truly useful (or at least entertaining), so that they’re of value to your followers.

To make sure you build an appropriate audience, go to the “Settings” menu and check the box that says “Protect My Updates.” This will enable you to approve each new follower request — a smart move if you want to block spammers on the site. Conversely, choosing to follow well-connected thought leaders in your field can help keep you abreast of trends in your industry, as well as the latest gossip. One good way to find people and sites in your industry is to search by what are called “hash tags” — key words preceded by the “#” sign that people can include in their tweets to make them searchable. For example, to find people posting about law or lawyers, you’d search under “#lawyer,” take a look at all the relevant tweets, and then choose to follow some of the people or groups with the most interesting posts.

4) Delicate Art of Using Facebook Effectively

Facebook can be a great way to reconnect with old friends who may now be in a position to help you with your career goals, as well as to stay in touch with colleagues on the site. But since there’s always a chance that someone in your network could post an embarrassing photo of you or make comments you don’t want your work contacts to see, make sure you’re familiar with the site’s privacy settings before building out your network of friends. Go to “Settings” at the top of your page, choose “Privacy” from the pull-down menu, and you’ll come to a page that lets you control who can see almost every posted item on your page, who can post messages to your wall, and even whether strangers can search for you and how much of your profile they can see.

Facebook is also rife with professional groups that you can join and subsequently exchange news with others in your industry and make new contacts. Simply type in the name of your profession or industry into the search bar and you’ll see a list of relevant groups, most of which you can join immediately. While these groups on Facebook are sometimes not as active and professionally focused as those on LinkedIn, they still can be a good way to meet new people.

Facebook can be particularly useful for getting the word out and building a community around a new business venture, but experts advise setting up a separate “fan page” of your venture to avoid making your personal page too promotional. John Mooney, principal of marketing firm JRM Communications LLC, recently advised a Manhattan client who sells waffles from a mobile truck to create a Facebook group. The client sends out news of the truck’s future whereabouts to people in his network that he’s invited to become fans, which has helped increase sales significantly. “They’re all in New York, and they’re all really into food,” says Mooney of the group’s members.

But of course. Social networking is all about quickly finding people in every possible niche. Especially the one that matters most to your career: that marvelous niche of folks who might just help you succeed.

Microsoft Robotics

palsikar — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 08:56:00 +0000

Microsoft® Robotics Developer Studio 2008 (RDS) is a Windows-based environment for hobbyist, academic and commercial developers to create robotics applications for a variety of hardware platforms. RDS includes a lightweight REST-style, service-oriented runtime, a set of visual authoring and simulation tools, as well as tutorials and sample code to help get started.

End-to-End Development Platform

RDS enables developers to create services for a wide-variety of robot hardware.

Non-programmers can create robot applications using a visual programming environment.

Microsoft Visual Programming Language enables anyone to create and debug robotics programs very easily. Just drag and drop blocks that represent services, and connect them. It is also possible to take a collection of connected blocks and reuse them as a single block elsewhere in the program.

Simulate robotics applications in 3D physics-based virtual environments

Easily simulate robotics applications using realistic 3D simulated models. Microsoft Visual Simulation Environment (VSE) includes AGEIA™ PhysX™ Technology from AGEIA Technologies Inc., a pioneer in hardware-accelerated physics, enabling real-world physics simulation for robot models. PhysX simulations can also be accelerated using AGEIA hardware.

AGEIA and PhysX are trademarks of AGEIA Technologies Inc.

Interact with robots using Windows or Web-based interfaces

Create applications that enabling remote monitoring and control of a robot, using a Web browser. Send it commands using existing Web technologies, such as HTML forms and JavaScript; plus mount cameras on the robots and control them to survey remote locations.

Lightweight REST-style, services-oriented runtime

RDS includes a .NET-based REST-style, services-oriented runtime consisting of two components: Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) and Decentralized Software Services (DSS).

Makes Asynchronous Programming Simple

The Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) makes it simple to write programs to handle asynchronous input from multiple robotics sensors and output to motors and actuators.

Real-time Monitoring of Robotics Sensors and Response to Motors and Actuators

The DSS application model makes it simple to access, and respond to, a robot’s state using a Web browser or Windows-based application.

Reuse Modular Services Using a Composable model

Build high-level functions using simple components, providing for reuse of code modules as well as better reliability and replaceability. For example, a lower-level sensor service could be integrated into a navigation service.

Scalable and Extensible Platform

The RDS programming model can be applied to a variety of robot hardware platforms, enabling users to transfer their skills across multiple platforms. The programming interfaces can be used to develop applications on single or multi-core processors.

Easily extend Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio Functionality

Third parties can extend the functionality of RDS by providing additional libraries and services. Hardware or software vendors can make their products easily compatible with RDS.

Supports both remotely connected (PC-based) and robot-based (autonomous) application scenarios

Remotely connected scenarios enable communication from a PC to the robot through a serial port, Bluetooth®, 802.11 (WiFi), or RF modem. Programs can also execute natively on PC-based robots running one of the Microsoft Windows operating systems, enabling fully autonomous operation.

Develop using a wide range of programming languages

With RDS, robotics applications can be developed using a selection of programming languages, including those in Microsoft Visual Studio® and Microsoft Visual Studio Express® (C# and VB.NET), as well as scripting languages such as Microsoft Iron Python®. Third-party languages that support the RDS services-based architecture are also supported.

Tools ‹ ALL about Offshore Marketing and Web Application Development — WordPress

palsikar — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:45:40 +0000

Tools ‹ ALL about Offshore Marketing and Web Application Development — WordPress.

Windows Azure Platform cloud services platform

palsikar — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:34:57 +0000

The Windows® Azure™ Platform (Azure) is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. Azure’s flexible and interoperable platform can be used to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities. Its open architecture gives developers the choice to build web applications, applications running on connected devices, PCs, servers, or hybrid solutions offering the best of online and on-premises.

Azure reduces the need for up-front technology purchases, and it enables developers to quickly and easily create applications running in the cloud by using their existing skills with the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment and the Microsoft .NET Framework. In addition to managed code languages supported by .NET, Azure will support more programming languages and development environments in the near future. Azure simplifies maintaining and operating applications by providing on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web and connected applications. Infrastructure management is automated with a platform that is designed for high availability and dynamic scaling to match usage needs with the option of a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Azure provides an open, standards-based and interoperable environment with support for multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and XML.

Microsoft also offers cloud applications ready for consumption by customers such as Windows Live™, Microsoft Dynamics™, and other Microsoft Online Services for business such as Microsoft Exchange Online and SharePoint® Online. The Windows Azure Platform lets developers provide their own unique customer offerings by offering the foundational components of compute, storage, and building block services to author and compose applications in the cloud.

Who Benefits From the Windows Azure Platform?

The Windows Azure Platform is designed to help developers easily create applications for the web and connected devices. The services platform offers the greatest flexibility, choice, and control in reaching users and customers while using existing skills.

Easy developer on-ramp to the cloud – Millions of developers worldwide already use the .NET Framework and the Visual Studio development environment. Utilize those same skills to create cloud-enabled applications that can be written, tested, and deployed all from Visual Studio. In the near future developers will be able to deploy applications written on Rubyon Rails and Python as well.

Enables Agile & Rapid Results – Applications can be deployed to the Windows Azure Platform with the click of a button. Changes can be made quickly and without downtime, making it an ideal platform for affordably experimenting and trying new ideas.

Imagine and Create New User Experiences – The Windows Azure Platform enables you to create web, mobile, or hybrid-applications that use the cloud with on-premises applications. Combined with Live Services ability to reach over 400 million Live users, new opportunities exist to interact and reach users in new ways.

Standards-Based Compatibility – The services platform supports industry-standard protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, RSS, and AtomPub, for consuming, exposing, and integrating with third-party services. You can easily integrate applications built on a variety of different technologies and operating systems.

Benefits for Business

he Windows Azure Platform offers a range of businesses flexibility, control, and an affordable solution for running Web-scale applications. The services reduce tedious and expensive infrastructure management and planning and are built with security and reliability in mind, along with the option of a pay-as-you-go model.

Whether you’re a software vendor, corporate IT group, or a start-up, by using the services platform you can focus on your business and the needs of your customers.

Simplify Capacity Planning – Additional computing and services capacity can be available for your needs, eliminating the need for planning, purchasing, and provisioning expensive hardware to meet unpredictable spikes in usage.

Simple Infrastructure Management – The services platform manages critical operating system updates and management tasks, giving you control of the environment while letting you focus on the needs of your users.

Give New Life To Existing Investments – The services platform can be used to provide new capabilities to existing on-premises and Web applications. The Windows Azure Platform can be integrated into existing applications or used to expose on-premises application services to consumers, business partners, or other organizations.

Why Choose Drupal

palsikar — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:38:23 +0000

Drupal is the most popular open source CMS on the market today, which essentially means that it is developed by volunteers who leave the freely available source code. Drupal is used daily by many people and communities to manage their Web sites.

That’s because you can make a very diverse range of Web applications:

- Institutional sites (the universities of Harvard, the Government of Belgium, some sites NASA)

- Portals and community of any size (Amnesty International)

- Intranet sites

- Blog, blog multiuser (blog of Tim Berners-Lee)

- Directory content (MTV)

- E-commerce (Warner Brothers Records)

- Digg.com clones, emulates the youtube and flickr.

- If Drupal was found the optimal choice for these Web sites, is also likely to meet our needs. With this guide we put the foundation to deepen their knowledge of Drupal and realize what we have in mind.

Why use Drupal

Drupal is a CMS Open Source more efficient and flexible available. With the latest versions 6.x, have improved many things, such as the installation: if the first change was necessary to hand the configuration files, now you can easily install everything, with a wizard, directly online.

Significant improvements were made through careful analysis of usability and the consequent improvement of the administration, which now has advanced controls that allow us, for example, to design the layout of the blocks through drag and drop.

The community, which has made it possible to achieve these results, counts a number of developers, testers and users, providing constantly new ideas and products – often for free – in order to achieve the most varied features.

Ultimately Drupal offers stability, security and performance, and apparently has worked very well on ease of use.

History

Drupal’s history began in 2000 between the desks of the University of Antwer. At the university did not provide free access to the Internet for students, so Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder decided to install a wireless router to connect ADSL to share the connection.

However, there was no system for sharing files and information, so Dries created a small interactive site that allowed students to send notes and useful to everyone. After university, the group of students decided to publish the site on the Internet, so that they could continue to communicate, so drop.org was born.

Once published on the Web, users of the site increased and members began talking about authentication, moderation, rating, as syndication and implement them on the site.

In 2001 Dries decided to release the software behind drop.org with the name of Drupal and open source license to allow others to use and extend the system.

Drupal CMS is a very powerful, but also a project that size and complexity, can intimidate the beginning. Following through and through the main theme of this guide to learn some ‘entire infrastructure, a Web site. Above all, remember that the experience is the greatest teacher: The more time passes trying to set up the site, the more we go between the secrets of Drupal and they include power and flexibility.

Drupal awarded 2008 Best CMS

osCommerce and Magento platform Differences

palsikar — Thu, 21 May 2009 18:04:18 +0000

I’ve worked with osCommerce and its derivatives for quite some time now. So had the architects of the Magento shopping cart before they came up with the idea of building a completely new Open Source shop cart. Given that osCommerce is widely considered to be the most popular Open Source cart, and that it has at last count 4766 community contributions from its 178,210 members you might wonder why they felt the need for a new cart. It is a good question, and here are my comments on one aspect of the question.

osCommerce has a very minimal release schedule. The Open Source philosophy of “Release Early, Release Often” is just not on the agenda. The last few releases have been backports of new code with minimal impact in terms of business features available in the cart.

Magento has, thus far, offered frequent releases offering significant new functionality long requested by members of the osCommerce community. Data export tools and a much improved backend are only the beginning – the difference is just huge. osCommerce is rather undocumented – and certainly so in terms of official documentation released by the designer. It has a person (one) responsible for developing or leading development of documentation – but little if any cohesive information pertinent to the current release. osCommerce does have established (if poorly understood) API’s for module development and a large body of shipping, payment and order total modules exists.

Magento has selected a professional PHP development framework on which to base development – offloading part of the development and documentation cost while taking advantage of organizations known for excellence in training. Varien has made an effort to get documentation in place with a wiki which, if not regularly maintained, does offer documentation by development team members which can be used to build shipping and payment modules. These are certainly very reasonable areas of focus for a project in this stage of its life cycle, and the practice bodes well for the future.

The osCommerce website features an active community forum with many involved community members. Quite a few of those members are technically accomplished and offer willing assistance. But there is little to no participation from the project members – announcements are few and far between and while many fans of the project constantly urge new members to wait for the 3.0 release of osCommerce – the 3 year wait for a release strains their credibility to the breaking point. If not further.

The Magento website encourages participation and has many actively involved members from both the community AND the project. The rapid move from the 0.7 release to a full 1.0 release is a welcome change. While it has resulted in some lag between semi-official Wiki postings on the APIs intermittent postings and updates by official developers offers a new hope that finally some balance between progress and stability will be available in an Open Source eCommerce project.

By now, the picture should be clear. You could say that the single biggest problem faced by the osCommerce community is the lack of an osCommerce project. Lacking this challenge, even the technical difficulties related to an EAV based database management scheme and the high demand for buzzword compliance placed on Magento coders is unlikely to hold this new kid on the block back for long.

Brand Struggling with Social media – Why

palsikar — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:44:34 +0000

Social media continues to grow globally in terms of adoption, usage, interest and impact in a massive way. It’s undeniably changing the way that content and information work particularly in terms of the publishing of consumer opinion. This has transformed the way that consumers relate to brands and the way that brands should operate, driving direct interaction, transparency and a more consultative approach.

However, we still operate in a system defined by the old media world and consequently big brand involvement is still in the main tentative and sporadic. From my experience of trying to get big brands to embrace the social revolution, there are a number of reasons why they have yet to embrace the real opportunities that involvement can deliver:

1. Social Media is often viewed as just another marketing channel: It is of course so much more; it is a completely different approach to interacting with consumers and customers. Of course, you can advertise in a social media environment, but the true return on investment comes from developing communities, creating content to be shared, and talking and listening directly with consumers.

2. It does not fit into current structures: True social media falls somewhere between marketing, PR, communications, content production and web development. No one is quite sure whose responsibility it is and who should ultimately deliver their organisation’s social media strategy.

3. Communities and content are global: Users of social media connect, consume, and share content globally with little care for international borders. Marketing and PR departments and objectives are set up nationally or regionally. Very few organisations have a truly international structure and perspective.

4. Social media needs a long term approach: To build community, distribute content, or get people actively involved in an application takes time. Marketing and PR work on short time frames and are wedded to sets of individual campaigns or short term objectives. Social media is not a campaign, it’s a permanent approach.

5. No guaranteed results: You book advertising and it’s guaranteed to work. For, example you book a web campaign on page views and you keep going until you reach your goal. This is what advertisers call a push medium, i.e. you choose when people see it. Social media is a pull medium; usage and interaction is totally dependent on the user choosing to do so. If it’s not relevant or lacks creative brilliance it will not work. This makes it hard.

6. The metrics are new: Companies are used to the big numbers of advertising, but these numbers are different. Advertising is measured in booked exposures, i.e. page views, while social media is measured in direct interactions, i.e. number of friends, number of views or number of users. These numbers will always be smaller, but not necessarily any less measure of success.

How do big brands take the proper approach to social media?

Fundamentally, it is about putting in place the right organisational structure with a social media department, which is responsible for a company’s long term approach to open their companies up to consumers and have a permanent social media presence. They should also work with marketing and PR to make sure that advertising, product development, research and communications all fit into the social media picture and all aspects of the company and the product are socially optimised. Certain forward thinking organisations, such as Intel and Ford, have already done this and this is the approach that should be followed.

There is also need for more and deeper research, to understand and quantify the value of engaging with consumers in social media versus traditional advertising. This is an emerging area that will see a lot more investment over the next year or so as is needed to show the financial case.

Lastly, companies need to look long term and understand the value that social media can bring to cultivate lifetime advocates of their brand. This is not about campaigns, but a permanent positioning. Hopefully, the current economy can help companies take this long-term perspective that has been lacking in the boom years.

Web 2.0 TO 3.0

palsikar — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 15:30:09 +0000

As we all see that everyone in the industry has made Web 2.0 their favorite buzzword for technology today. But now when we are on the cutting edge of Internet competition and as technology moves forward we soon be hitting with a whole new bubble of Web 3.0. This new Web 3.0 might turn the Internet into a huge database and our place in it will be to organize this source of information into parts that are suitable to us.
It entirely would depend on how we will make use of this new web to make search for information much easier, it can be our guide to the future of Internet technology. I’m not the only one to speculate about Web 3.0, but the companies and some famous bloggers also give a sneak peak at what the Internet’s future has to offer.
A lot of you who are reading this are bloggers, you might be interested to know about this shift from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 change in the technology. In this post I want to discuss about what do you want to see in the coming Web Technology that we might have missed in the existing.

As Steve Spalding describes:

“Web 3.0 as a set of highly specialized information silos, moderated by a cult of personality, validated by the community, and put into context with the inclusion of meta-data through widgets”.

Searching Information
Today Web uses keywords to collect data into usable amount. Search Engines index the Internet en masse and present it to the end user in order of significance. They settle on relevance by using complicated algorithms. But Web 2.0 changed the basic way we searched. With introduction of tags users could describe anything as anything and search for items in a manner people look at it.
Web 3.0 will take this one step further. If you are searching for information on Mobile phones, for example, you would use the search engine as you normally would, but your results would be more specialized sub engines. I would find Nokia Search or Motorola Search. From there, I would be able to dig deeper and find items that have been tagged as relating to Nokia and sort them into their major categories (pictures, videos, blog posts, news articles, commerce etc…) Each of these could be captured as an RSS feed so that I can be alerted when something new is added to by search profile.

The engines will order these items in a new way combining the old and the new web. The strong tags that are used currently by these engines would be carried further but some importance would be given to that are flagged by communities as interests and votes.

Searching Validation
There will be a whole new approach to information, example if im looking for news on a particular item instead of information, my search will definitely be slightly different. Along with the specialized search engines, People Search would be available. One could type what they looking for like “Conservative viewpoint on Indian Nuclear Deal” for example and it would pull up results ordered by relevance (algorithms), tagging, and validation through user voting.

Searching Entertainment
Stumble Upon may be the closest comparison to how we will be entertained in Web 3.0. You fill out a profile, define your tags and then flip the channel. It will be a lot like services like Swicki as well, where you can interact with the content that you are seeing and generate communities around it.
Example: Swicki, StumbleUpon, Joost

Search for People (Social Networks)
Can you imagine a technology where you look for a friend and the search shows all the networks he/she is a part of and produce a feed around them. Wow! I can see the word social networks completely changed into “People Search”. If I put a proper name into the search engine of Web 3.0 it would provide the running profile of my presence on the web; it would show everything in the webosphere that has been tagged as belonging to me, ordered by community validation and relevance.
Example: Explode, Spock, The Gorb, Orangeply.

E-Commerce
The entire advertising setting will change, as companies do their best to target the niche audiences produced by the inclusion of People Search and very specific subengines. Contextual advertisement will take second seat to product placements on sites, search results and subengines relating to the messages that companies are trying to get out.
Example: MySpace

These were all the basic changes that might take place in the shift of Web. I would like to continue talking about it in my next blog on Web 3.0 Designs. There is a lot more exercise in understanding how people will naturally take this transformation and we will discuss it further in my coming blogs.

Some Related Articles:

From Website to Web service
Web 3.0- You have seen nothing yet!
Web 3.0
Todays Web 3.0 Blogstorm
Define Web 3.0
The more Revolutionary Web
Web 3.0 and Beyond