My First Online Shopping in India

I was looking for a book on hibernate, specifically "Hibernate in Action", but couldn't find one in local book stores. Luckily the book was available at FirstAndSecond.com . I was bit reluctant trying on indian online books stores. But finally finding no other altrantive I ordered the book.



And my experience has been mixed. It took them overall 5 days to ship my book. Thinking about the general nature of indians, I would regard myself as lucky, that I was able to get that fast. But what frusturated me was that 4 out of 5 days took to verify the credit card payment. For 4 days the status of my order was for verification of my online credit card payment. And this is what kept me fed up for the first 4 days. And luckily the courier service just took one day to ship the book within Delhi.



The second thing that I felt bad was: FirstAndSecond. com mentions about Cash on Delivery option on their website, but when one actually goes and selects an option for payment, the Cash on Delivery option is missing. This kind of inconsistency is simply not acceptable from such a company.



One of my other friends who had sent a gift to a friend from one of the online indian company was surprised to find out that the bill reciept was sent along with the gift. These kind of negligiences simply should not exist.



I hope in this coming year, indian online companies will improve their quality.

Product Development Service Companies

Venture Blog India has a nice article on the rise of product development service companies. These companies differentiate themselves from pure consultancy services by developing surrounding modules of a core product.

Typically, when any company starts to develop a software product, it would have a unique differentiator or core of the product. That core generally accounts for 15 per cent of the development work of the product. This would invariably be developed in-house. But the product would also have a lot of other modules. These are essential, but they are not big differentiators. This is where product development services companies step in - they develop these non-core modules.

Billing rates of such companies can be quite high but on the other hand the model here is not as scalable as in the IT services sector.

Any success stories to talk about?



US-based Stata Labs, founded by Raymie Stata (Ray Stata's son) had outsourced the entire development of its email software product "Bloomba" to iSoftTech.



Yahoo! recently acquired Stata Labs along with the 20 iSoftTech engineers working for Stata Labs. Yahoo! now plans to use Bloomba to take on Microsoft's Outlook and Google's Gmail.

Complete story is available here.

Future of Mobile Content

SonyEricsson has its paper on "Mobile Web Initiative Workshop"



Some of the key points from the paper are:

In 2006 we expect most phones to have a mobile Web browser that is able to render almost any Web page on the Internet. WAP is history and, from a technology point of view, the mobile Web has converged with the de facto Internet standards.



...

New mobile Web browsers render Web sites designed for PCs in 'smart way' on a mobile phone. This will make mobile browsing more popular. But we do not think this is the final solution to the mobile Web.

It presents two interesting cases for data services for average consumer on the mobile web.

First one is :

Covergence of music with phone (music-phones) and more trend towards personal streaming(Personal radio).

Mobile Photo Services - ability share pictures, albums seamlessly.



The second case if the ability to get information updates via RSS medium.

We believe that RSS has a great potential in mobile phones, as a technology to automatically provide updated content to users - accessing the Web without browsing.

Some of the aspects match with what Wirkle is trying to do. Wirkle strongly believes in wireless as a medium where an avergae user can keep track of his needs weather its normal content or a service.



I believe that the mobile and the PC have different needs in terms of content. With wireless handsets, smart phones and browser technology maturing on phones, surfing on mobile will become a lot easier. But Wireless devices being small handy devices require a medium where user can get specific information that he wants, when he wants and where he wants it. A user doesn't want to burdened with the information load of the internet. But at the same time there shouldn't be any segmentation between the content that occurs on the web and the mobile web.

Scalability Solutions in Real-World companies

Architect Corner has links on how companies like eBay, google, yahoo have designed their systems.

It is interesting to note how scalability is achieved in google, ebay and other high traffic websites. The references below talk about different ways of achieving the scalability. Some notes out of these references is : Function Server Pools, Horizontal and Vertical Data Partitioning, Custom O-R Mapping, Page Rendering Optimization, Logical Cache based on User preferences, Messaging.

# Amazon Case Study http://hugo.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~yjhsu/courses/u2010/papers/Amazon%20Recommendations.pdf

# One Billion Transactions http://javaoneonline.mentorware.net/servlet/mware.servlets.StudentServlet?mt=1087580919819&mwaction=showDescr&class_code=TS-3264(USA,2003)&from=technical&fromtopic=By%20Topic&subsysid=2000&topic=technical

# Yahoo Rendering Page http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&r=1&l=50&f=G&d=PALL&s1=5983227.WKU.&OS=PN/5983227&RS=PN/5983227

# Ebay's Architecture http://www.manageability.org/blog/stuff/about-ebays-architecture/view

# A paper on scalable eAuction Place http://hugo.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~yjhsu/courses/u2010/papers/auction_fp.pdf

# Google Grows and Grows http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/69/google.html

Back To India

After spending two and a half great years in Austria, I am finally back in India. Its already been more than two months in India, and I haven't had written a single post. Days just passed around but I hope to be more regular in days to come.



So what are my next plans? I am working now in a wireless content services startup "Wirkle". The startup is founded and led by people from IIT-Delhi. Wirkle will provide personalized content on wireless devices. It will develop an alternate channel for data services which on one hand are highly personalized for a user and secondly enable content providers to enable their existing web content for wireless and make that available in a personalized fashion.



Anyone interested in knowing more, can contact me directly at sunil@wirkle.com .

Indian Barbie goes Mobile!

Came to know from Mobile Weblog, about barbies with REAL mobiles!

Mattel in India have launched a Barbie doll, impeccably dressed as always, but also with her own must-have accessory - a mobile phone.



But this is no toy - the mobile works. Barbie's owners can Instant Message Barbie and friends who have a Barbie too. Plus the look of the phone can be changed to match her clothes. It's priced at R 1199 (USD 26), according to The Statesman.



Whatever next - a phone for dogs? Ahh, we had that last week.



Caveat - I can't find any collaboration of this, but if it isn't true now, it will be shortly.



My best idea for Barbie was producing clothes for kids, so that they could dress like her. Mattel didn't think kids would like this - they were joking, right? Now as a parent, I'm glad it never happened. Don't tell her I wrote this, but Barbie is a bit errr...tarty in her dress sense and I wouldn't like my kids copying her in quite that way.

Whats next on the line ?

Amazon wishlist Tracker

WatchCow provides a service for monitoring Amazon.com wishlists and alerts when a watched item's price changes or the inventory becomes available. Thanks to Topix.net for the link.



Watchcow Steps:

1. While browsing Amazon, you find a wishlist (your own or a friends) or a particular product you want to keep track of.

2. You click the MOOO! bookmarklet in your browser OR you copy the URL and paste it to the Watchcow Feed Builder form.

3. The Watchcow will allow you to finetune your new feed and import it into your favorite newsreader.

4. Next time a price change is happening for one of your watched items, be it new price or used price or both (you decide), your newsreader will tell you about it.

Indiatimes RSS feeds

Times of India has finally released RSS feeds for its website. They are not one or two in number but more than 70 feeds consisting of topics from Times of India and Economic Times.



You can find them here http://info.indiatimes.com/rss/

Tracing India's Incubation Centres

In the coming days, I will try to prepare a list of India's Technology Incubation Centres. My belief is they are still quite low in number and the ones that are there they don't provide sufficient mentoring to young entrepreneurs.



I remember from my days at IIT, even the sound of the word 'entrepreneur' made some of my colleagues/friends excited and enthusiastic! And I think all across India, there are quite many young people who want to try their hand on it. But I think there aren't much opportunities. Moreover I feel even the young people who want to do it, they aren't matured enough. Even the environment at IIT's don't provide mentoring for developing entrepreneurship.



But some start has already been made. And with the small effort, atleast some companies have started springing up. I hope within the next 10 years, we will not see just few but atleast hundreds of technology companies springing up.



Technology Incubation Centres

1) TBIU (Technology Business Incubation Unit) IIT Delhi:

TBIU is run by Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT), IIT Delhi.

http://www.fitt-iitd.org



2) Business Incubator, IIT Mumbai:

Its run by KReSIT (Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology) at IIT Mumbai.

http://www.it.iitb.ac.in/bi/



3)SIDBI Innovation and Incubation center, IIT Kanpur

http://www.iitk.ac.in/siic/index.html



4)IIM Ahmedabad

Indian Incubator for Innovation based Enterprises (I3E)

http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/ciie/i3e.htm



5)IIM Bangalore

NSRCEL - Global Internet Venture Incubation Centre

http://www.iimb.ernet.in/html/m-frames.jsp?ilink=112&pname=faculty.jsp&areaid=5



6)Indiaco

http://www.indiaco.com

Private incubator



7)ITBI (Information Technology Busienss Incubator) STEP, Noida

http://www.jssstepnoida.org/index.asp

Not much information available on the website.



8)STEP TREC, Tiruchirappalli

http://www.trecstep.com/

There are lot many projects mentioned but doesn't have any details on incubation.



9)National Design Business Incubator by National Institute of Design, NID, Ahmedabad.

http://www.nidindia.com/



10) Nirma Labs - Technology Incubation Unit.

http://www.nirmalabs.org





Venture Capital links

http://www.nasscom.org/vc_list.asp

http://www.indiavca.org/memberprofiles.htm



Resources

http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/ciie/resources.htm





Any other links, please do post on. I will include them in the list!

VC PITCH

NWVentureVoice blog writes about tips for a VC Pitch.

VC Pitch Tips



The most important thing in having a successful pitch to a VC is to have a great business and a great team, but even if you have both it doesn't hurt to have a super crisp, logical, compelling pitch. Here are 5 basic tips that I have seen really work.



1. Outline

First, have an outline. Be organized. The best top level outline I have heard it from one of the super masters of presentations, Jerry Weissman. Before you focus on all the snazzy charts, make sure you do the following:

• Tell them what you are going to tell them: Show them where you are going to take them, on the title slide.

• Tell them how you are going to tell them: Have an agenda slide and stick to it.

• Tell them: make sure the body of your presentation always reinforces your opening point.

• Tell them what you told them: wrap up, recap and go for the close.



2. In a nutshell

One great tool for making this organzation stick is what I call the "in a nutshell" slide. This is using your agenda slide to tell the skeleton of your whole arguement. When presenting to Steve Ballmer it often happened that you never got off the first slide after the title, so make sure it really works for you.



Normally, I like to see In A Nutshell slides that act as a template. On one side they highlight, even number the key elements of your story/pitch/arguement and in parallel on the other side they give the top support points in summary. As you then move through the deck you keep the left hand template to reinforce the whole arguement and help people remember where you are in it.



3. Clear, simple case

Show why your company/investment should exist in the first place. Do the simple case using what we call your ABCs or situation/gap analysis. Where:

• A = Today: the current situation in the market/big growing

• B = Tommorrow: the place the market should be/juicy opportunity

• C = Gap: what's missing to get to B/the special play you are poised to make to fill it and win



4. Simple positioning and proposal

Then tell why your way of filling this gap is better than everyone else's. One simple outline for this is what we call the XYZs - "We are the only X company/product that solves Y customer problem in Z unique way," where

• X = your category: critical for VCs, we need to put you in some box, to make comparisons; never invent a category, improve one.

• Y = the target: the buyer, the person who actually writes the check, great if you actually have some.

• Z = your differentiation: your advantage, or the key positive distinction you have over your competition.



It also helps if you can back all this up with real support, like your team's track record, customer traction, a real competitive analysis (thier ABCs), etc. A demo is not enough. Proof is better than claims.



5. Best foot forward first and strongest

Tune the organization of your story to the stage of your company. And always put the strongest stuff upfront.

• An EIR: It's all about YOU and the market opportunity/competitive gap.

• A seed: It's all about initial market validation (quotes from friends with important job titles in your target customer's industry), then about the product spec, the team and the above.

• A round: It's all about initial customer traction and economics - some demonstrated willingness to try and pay - show the best real numbers you have, then about the product itself relative to others, then the above/

• B round: It's about momentum - show the sales numbers, the trends and the economics, then all the above.

RSS Traffic too heavy for MSDN!

Scoble reports that MSDN had to remove text from within its RSS feeds and make them lighter in order to cope with traffic generated via RSS.

RSS is broken, is what happened. It's not scalable when 10s of thousands of people start subscribing to thousands of separate RSS feeds and start pulling down those feeds every few minutes (default aggregator behavior is to pull down a feed every hour).



Bandwidth usage was growing faster than MSDN's ability to pay for, or keep up with, the bandwidth. Terrabytes of bandwidth were being used up by RSS.



So, they are trying to attack the problem by making the feeds lighter weight. I don't like the solution (I've unsubscribed from almost all weblogs.asp.net feeds because they no longer provide full text) but I understand the issues.



I know of a major broadcaster that refuses to turn on RSS feeds because of this issue too. We need smarter aggregators and better defaults.



I only pull down RSS feeds once per day -- right before I start reading my feeds.



But, clearly, RSS is losing some of its advantages. More and more sites are not providing full-text feeds. I can't fight this one alone.

Business Baazigar

Business Baazigar! Its a name of the Zee reality show that will pick India's best entrepreneur. Zee will air a 36-episode series with entries for the competiton from people from all walks of life from across the company.



Business Standard has a complete story on the competition.

In this real life drama, executives, students, housewives and even the retired, from cities as well as small towns and villages, will compete for the title of "India's best entrepreneur" and obtain funding to implement their idea. The show, being produced by 25 FPS Media, goes on air from January 2005.



The process will start by a call for entries, followed by a panel shortlisting the thousands of preliminary entries down to a manageable number of around 100.



These will then be further shortlisted to 20 who will compete with one another. According to the company, auditors of repute will supervise the entire shortlisting process to ensure completely transparency.



"The judging criteria would be the contestants' intelligence, strategic skills and their ability to think on their feet when time and money are at a premium. At the conclusion of each task, the winning team will be granted a lavish reward that will consist of money as well unforgettable experiences with the biggest and the best," the spokesperson said. The final two survivors will find their big dream funded by the big jury, he added.

Competitions like these are quite helpful to motivate young entrepreneurs. But having competitions alone is just not sufficient. The number of technology incubation centres in India is just meagre. Indian insitutions are beginning to learn the path to foster entrepreneurship but they still have a long way to go. IIT's have been able to make a start by setting up technology incubation centres. But we need not just 5 or 10 but on the scale of 500 - 1000 such centres!

1.5 GB in a phone!

Samsung has released called the SPH-V5400, phone with a 1.5GB hardrive. My first PC at home Pentium 1, 166Mhz, 7 years back just had around 1 GB hard drive :-)







Now you can put all your songs, pictures on the phone for a price tag of around $800!



Thanks to Russell from Mobile Technology Weblog for the link.

Creating Options!

Rajesh Jain in his tech talk writes about the importance of Creating Options:

TECH TALK: Creating Options: Personal Examples

I was in the twelfth standard (junior college). Even as I was preparing for the IIT entrance examination, my father insisted that I apply to the best universities abroad. His viewpoint was that there should be no compromise in getting the best education, and if I did not get into IIT, it would at least give me options to consider. As it turns out, I did get admission into both IIT and Carnegie-Mellon. I chose IIT because I get the discipline of my choice (Electrical Engineering) and the location of my choice (Mumbai). As I think about this, I realise that what my father did was to create an option for me for a decision that would be critical in shaping my career.

Many years later, as I looked for a partner for IndiaWorld, this same lesson of creating options hit home again. I had a choice – between selling to Sify, and doing a joint venture with an international company in the Internet business, with the possibility of listing the JV on Nasdaq at a future point of time. The availability options helped me (and my investment bankers) negotiate from a position of strength, and get the best possible valuation for IndiaWorld. If there is just one company with whom we are talking, there would have little question of significant discussion on the terms. We would have ended up accepting what they put on the table. But because there was a choice that we had, we could do much better. It is something I tell other entrepreneurs also – always have options available when it comes to raising capital, else there is no point discussing since you only have to decide if you want to take the offer that is there on the table or not.

In fact, we ended up in the situation where we could consider various offers for IndiaWorld because of some choices we had made right at the beginning. Portals were what we wanted to do, but we also had to ensure that we created revenues to ensure that we lived through long enough till the portals future took off. So, we started developing websites for various organisations in India, even as we created a suite of portals for Indians on the Internet abroad and in India. The websites ensured a steady revenue flow which kept us profitable, and allowed us to wait till the best offer came along. Since we were not losing money and had no external investors, we could take our time in making the decision – there was no pressure on meeting payroll at the end of the month which would force us into decisions which may not have been the smartest ones. Creating options is about ensuring that we can manage both the short-term and the long-term.

Creating options is a must for every entrepreneur. One never knows when the best of the options cease to exist. Its the back up plan that takes the lead then. So think through all your options.

MSN Music supports RSS

Microsoft’s new music service supports RSS feeds with top 100 songs, albums and artists. The feed also contains a link to a 30 sec clip of the song. It defines a tag called "enclosure" for inserting the link to the song within RSS.



<enclosure url="mms://a992.v11451c.c11451.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/992/11451/v0001/msnent.download.akamai.com/12336/BFHJ23HZ/Prod/wma/v9/Audio/07/75/55/557507.wma?WMCache=1&WMBitrate=200000&WMThinning=1&ibcd1=songid11493990" type="audio/wma" />



But one needs to use IE and the song can be played in MSN Media Player.



Thanks to Danny Ayers for the link.

Values!

Values play an important role weather its you being an individual, a team player or a leader. In each of the these roles, values is what binds people together, it creates like-mindedness and drives people, teams and organizations. Its the key driving force to excell.



Values create brand!



MarketingPlaybook writes:

But we believe that values are critical. Who you really are and what you believe in should embue everything you do and everything you say. This is especially true in your marketing and in developing a real brand. No matter how slick and well produced your ads and sales pitches, if you don't walk the talk in the long run people will stop believing and those ads and pitches will be shoved back in your face.

So what are your values? Really? Think about it.

Google Adsense

I signed on the Google Adsense program. Blogger.com started allowing Goggle Adsense ads on the web blogs. So why did I sign it?



That's Simple! Just thought of trying it out. So if you want to see me rich, click , click and click on the Google Ads on my blog :-)

Beware - Writing Blogs can take your job Away!

Blogging is becoming a more common phenonemon with millions of bloggers posting messages on a daily basis. Organizations have started adopting this but in some cases it can cause flury within the same organization. Few months back I heard about Microsoft firing an employee for posting some pictures on his blog, which showed Macs ordered by Microsoft. And today yet another case, Friendster fires an employee and the reason again was blog. Here is the link for the friendster gal , who got fired. http://troutgirl.com/blog/index.php?/archives/46_Shitcanned.html



Even though the posts for which she was fired don't look damaging for the company, but writing anything about your corporation, please first check your corporation policy. A big brother might be watching you!



Thanks to rotwodtwo(http://www.mblog.com/rtwodtwo/) for the link.

Olympic Games - Celebrate Humanity

One of the tv commercials for the olympics that touched me.

Heart



If you could have the arms of Hercules,

Legs as swift as the wind;



If you could leap shoulder high above the rim,

Have the kick of a dolphin, the reflexes of a cat;



If you could have all this, you would have the body,

you would have the tools,



But you will not have greatness,

until you understand that the strongest muscle is the heart.



To me that's the soul of the olympic games.

Watch the videos from here.

http://www.olympic.org/uk/passion/humanity/index_uk.asp

Executors in JDK1.5

Brian Geotz has an article at JavaPro for using Executors in JDK1.5 .



JDK1.5 intorduces Executors which can help maintain thread pools and management of task execution. The article is available at this link . http://www.ftponline.com/javapro/2004_08/online/bgoetz_08_04_04/default_pf.aspx

Multimedia Snapshot

As I was writing my previous blog on TIVO getting the nod for distributing digital content over the internet and media companies need to open up, a thought struck my mind.



Blogging has become a world wide phenomenon, with mllions of bloggers blogging every second. Search engines like Technorati are keeping track of each and every blog and enabling to search the live web, getting to know opinions of people as and when they are published.



Can such a thing be reproduced with live multimedia streams ? There are limited number of audio and video blogs that exist, but I think they are not well organised. There are no search engines to search through, there's no proper central interface like Technorati etc. which can pick the live video streams, club them nicely together and publish it as a news channel.



Currently all the audio and video blogs are kept in files , associated with certain text ; one can go and read text and hear audios, but what would be interesting is if one can generate a live 24 hour video channel from multiple splitted up videos contributed by people from all over the world.



Next time, when I hear a breaking news, I can hear not just what media houses present to me but what the local residents themselves experience. I can have something like visual map of the whole world and can zoom in or out and can wish to hear news stories from any big city to any small native town of any corner of the world.



Big news media does the organization and presentation of news very well - but thats a challenge if one can be a blogger, then there might be whole lot of people who become indepedent journalists, have a rating system and with some clever multimedia and semi-automatic analysis and then anyone can have a live multimedia snapshort of the world at any given moment of time.



This is yet far from reality, but as we move into the future - more and more multimedia generated by our peers will start affecting our life.

TIVO Gets the Nod

CNN has the newstory on TIVO finally getting the nod to go ahead with distributing media over the internet. http://money.cnn.com/2004/08/04/technology/tivo.reut/

TiVo Inc., maker of popular digital television recording devices, Wednesday received approval for technology that would permit users to send copies of digital broadcast shows over the Internet.

The Federal Communications Commission voted to certify digital protections on TiVoToGo, which is not yet available but would enable a user to record and send a digital broadcast television show to up to nine other registered people who have a key allowing them to see it.



The approval came despite concerns by the Motion Picture Association of America and the National Football League about the risks of unfettered distribution of copyrighted shows and illegally airing sports games outside of authorized markets. .........

I think this is an important step for closing the gap between rich digital media which is controlled by media companies with the content on internet which is mainly text based. Media companies need to find more ways to distribute content via internet, making it a rich channel and also earn money along the way. In the long run, they would themselves in trouble if they don't open up.

Patents or No Patents

Got an interesting link from Technodirt about Software Patents



Patents Have Become The Nuclear Stockpiling Of The Software Industry

MÃ¥rten Mickos, CEO of mySQL, has written a piece over at Always-On, explaining (accurately) that the software patent game these days is the equivalent of nuclear stockpiling. You build up as many patents as you can, because you know the competition is, too, and you'll need them to fight off any patent battle. It doesn't need to be this way. In fact, it shouldn't be this way, because all it's doing is slowing down innovation and diverting money away from development to lawyers. Mickos uses the database industry as an example. In the days before software patents, plenty of people took the relational database ideas of Edgar Codd (totally random aside: I had a database professor in college who had the bumper sticker: "Codd is God" in honor of Mr. Codd) and built up a thriving industry, including the standardization of SQL, on which the entire industry is based. While he doesn't say it specifically, the clear implication is that in a world of software patents, that situation wouldn't have existed. Letting everyone build their own implementations based on the idea of relational databases and the standards of SQL allowed a thriving, competitive industry to develop. Copyright laws protect the code. However, when we patent ideas, the first person to come up with the "idea" of a relational database could have patented it -- and simply stopped the competition from happening without coughing up license fees to IBM. As we've said before, innovation is more important than invention. By allowing the inventor to patent an entire concept, it kills the ability to innovate, harming the entire economy.

The complete news story is at

http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=P5141_0_3_0_C



There is an interesting quote from Bill Gates from this newsstory..

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. The solution...is patent exchanges...and patenting as much as we can...A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors."



That quote is very telling. It is from Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft, in his "Challenges and Strategy Memo" of May 16, 1991.

HTML Editor Blogger.com

Blogger.com added a simple Html editor for writing blog entries. Taking the Gmail efforts further with some nice javascripting, looks like soon we might have full fledged editors via the web. The current interface provides the basic funtionality of font, size, text alignment, inserting links , back ground colors, spell checking, numbered and bullet point lists.



Even the keyboard shortcuts work!



Here's the screenshot for how it looks.



Blogger. com doesn't provide an image upload service. I just tried at Flickr. I thought it would give me a direct url for an image which I make public, but it didn't do that. So for now I need to look for another photo upload service.

Opera Mobile Accelerator

Edd Dumbill wrote about his analysis of the recently launched Opera Mobile Accelerator. Mobile Phone Users can use a proxy server hosted by Opera through a montlhy subscription fees for getting optimised content saving bandwidth and cost benefit. I had a previous entry on the same topic here. Here is what Edd writes :



I decided to take the Accelerator for a spin on my Sony Ericsson P800 phone, running the Opera 6.31 browser. Setting the proxy up was simply a case of entering the URL of an auto-configuration page. Thereafter I browsed as normal.

The speed-up you get will depend on the content you read and how much Accelerator can optimize it. To see if Accelerator lived up to its claims, I performed some experiments. I tried three different sites: my own weblog, BBC News and O'Reilly Network. The latter has adverts on it, which introduces some unknowns into my measurements.

I tested the amount of kilobytes my phone had to send and receive over GPRS in order to load each page. I am charged by total data transfer, so the sum of these is the key figure. I didn't test download times, as there were too many variables involved to get an objective measure.

Here are the download results.

Site	Normal (KB)	Accelerated (KB)	Improvement
My weblog	8 + 52 = 60	8 + 32 = 40	33%
BBC News	59 + 135 = 194	26 + 36 = 62	68%
O'Reilly Network	27 + 135 = 162	34 + 92 = 126	22%

Note that the cache was cleaned and Opera restarted before every load.

So it looks like I'm getting savings in bandwidth between around 20% and 70%. At the top end, this is definitely consistent with Opera's claim of 70%. At the lower end, however, it looks like Opera's 50% figure is a little optimistic.

The savings afforded by the Accelerator definitely improve when used in conjunction with your browser's cache. I performed the experiment again for my weblog, but without cleaning the cache:

Site	Normal (KB)	Accelerated (KB)	Improvement
My weblog	8 + 36 = 44	7 + 14 = 21	52%

Of course, when browsing on my P800, I don't always start either with no cache, or a full cache. Neither do I always have image loading on, as I did for this test. It certainly is the case that I save bandwidth by using Accelerator, whatever the conditions.

Continued.

So, crunch point. Will Mobile Accelerator pay for itself? I often use a lot of GPRS data, but more often through fetching my email over a Bluetooth link to my laptop. Accelerator only works with web content, obviously, so how much do I need to browse to make a saving? Opera are offering the service at 3 Euros per month. Given that I might expect to get around 50% data saving, this means the break-even point is 6 or more Euros worth of GPRS in web browsing.

The complete entry is over here.

AlwaysOn Network Conference

AlwaysOn Network conference (AO2004) took place at Stanford University July 13 – 15. The webcast of the conference is available live. Thanks to Paul Allen from Infobaseventures for the link.



There are some interesting panel discussions. Just looked through the war between the WIFI and 3G technologies. Came to know about some interesting facts - companies like Tropos Networks using Mesh technologies with technologies such as WiMax can build up a wide area network for a whole city in just 3 weeks. Next year in Asia - WiMAX will be rolled out in some particular cities. It looks to be growing at much faster pace.



The key to all wireless technologies is still - what does a consumer want? What kind of applications - irrespective of any network will provide the kind of mobility a user wants.



The link to all the web casts and the schedule can be had from here .

http://www.alwayson-network.com/events/index.php

Raising Venture Money

NW Venture Voice has a nice blog entry "How to Shop for Venture Money" for entrepreneurs.



Rule #1: Don’t raise money.

What? A VC saying don’t sell equity? Selling equity is the most expensive way to finance a company. Exhaust ALL other options first. When I left Microsoft in 1997 to start Loudeye, the first six months were total bootstrapped. We begged, borrowed, and squeezed whatever we could out of our reserve cash, friends, neighbors, and even strangers. The first money into an idea is always the most expensive and it should be your own if you can afford it, your own sweat if you can’t. If you believe in your idea, run up your credit cards, take out a second mortgage, apply for research grants, go to the SBA, borrow money from your parents, whatever you do, put some real skin in the game before sharing with any equity investors. Think about it; future investors will value the personal commitment; if your idea is great, why sell part on the cheap? Here is another trick, put in the early money as a bridge loan which converts at a later financing round. Let the market put a value on your idea later, after it is worth more! Necessity is truly the mother of invention. Less money = more necessity = more invention! <>



Rule #2: Choose equity investors with a long-term view.

When you go to a bank to borrow money for a car they ask what your income will be next month, check your credit, ask for a financial plan and make a decision. If anything material in your financial plan changes, they will probably want their car back. Banks have a very low tolerance for ambiguity and bumps in the road. I am starting to see business plans again that are “built to flip” – companies with a 12-18 month view of the world going for a quick sale. Your equity investors should not act like this or condone these strategies. Investors who have been through a couple of tech cycles will have the right tolerance for change and desire to build a business with legs. In good times and bad, in sickness and health (sound familiar?). Ideally there should be a similar level of commitment. Software products are especially iterative undertakings. Remember Microsoft Windows 1.0? 2.0? 3.0? You probably didn’t buy until 3.1 with everyone else. As an entrepreneur with a big vision, you need investors who share a similar time frame. <> <>



Rule #3: Choose equity investors with a real life view.

Good equity investors should be business partners, not just financial investors. Purely financial investors should be the public markets, unfortunately as the mood brightens, many of them will come back into the private equity markets. Look for people who have worked in related businesses to yours. An Entrepreneur turned investor who has raised money and run a P&L statement is a good bet. Ask for references from other companies they have invested in. Call the CEOs. Ask how the board meetings go, what kinds of questions are asked, how the investor manages, their level of engagement, etc. Google your potential investors. How active are they? Do they contribute to trade publications? If they have a blog, read it. Through this research, if you get the feeling that a potential investor is more interested in their golf handicap or mastering an Excel spreadsheet, move on. Life is too short. <>



Rule #4: Choose equity investors who understand and are passionate for your business. <>

Great start-ups solve hard technology problems. I am a technology geek. My first computer was a Tandy TRS-80. I owned a Timex Sinclair, a Kapro, a Commodore 64, Compaq’s first “luggable”, and many other first that I am embarrassed to admit. I get bored if I don’t have a hard problem to solve. I find it incredibly stimulating to be around other people with a passion for technology and a desire to solve hard problems. Investors whose interest in your business is primarily financial and have only a passing interest in the hard problem you are trying to solve can actually do more harm than good. A good way to test this is to pay attention during the diligence process. Do they ask informed questions about your business? Or is it the standard “What keeps you up at night?” Do they get up to the white board during the presentation? Are they candid and helpful with feedback? If you don’t come out of a meeting with an investor feeling smarter, more challenged and more engaged with your business, move on to another investor.

Portability Rules for Mobile Java Apps

Simon Keogh, Director of Product Management for Tira Wireless, wrote an article on "Avoid the 9 Common Flaws of Unportable Mobile Java Apps" here.



The key points are:



1) Avoid Hard-coding for Screen Sizes within applications

2) Avoid Hard-coding of Sound Elements (Store them in separate files)

3) Make Provisions for Incoming Calls or Messages. The application should "pause" and "resume" appropriately when a phone call or sms is recieved.

4) Store any constants needed in a central location such as a config file or class file in the JAR.

5) Take into account the MIDP Spec and Global Operator OTA Environment, especially the settings in manifest and JAD files as these can vary for operators.

6) Taking Localization Issues(multiple languages) into account from the start of the development.

7) Proprietary API's : Use judiciously - Avoid using them as it hampers portability.

8) Keep the application size below 64KB. More popular devices have an upper limit of 64KB.

9) Take care of industry De-facto standards for UI. Provide Main Menu; buttons like Help, About, Exit; and use menus and hotkeys in standard ways.



Account for portability from the beginning of development and not when the application is complete.

Gridbag - Java

Matt Quail has a cool animated blog on whats it with working using GridBag Layout!!

See the animation here.



Thanks to Cedric Beust for the link.

Semantic Web - More Richness is that we want?

Its been a year since when I have started knowing about semantic web and things that it tries to achieve. Semantic Web looks like a grand vision in which we can have some sort of machine to machine communication on the web as contrast to human-machine communication - as is the world today.



To build this grand vision of semantic web, one must know what are ontologies. Ontologies provide the necessary glue to provide semantics. Ontologies can be as simple as a dictionary, thesaurus, taxonomy to a complex structure consisting of hundreds of concepts and relationships & properties existing between concepts which can be represented formally (by logic statements).



And then there are actual data instances which are then mapped to ontology concepts. And based on this one can do reasoning on data instances. People on the web have been trying to build complex and more complex ontologies to represent small to complex domains. And the people who build such ontologies argue that this is the way to go and they have their reservations what web ontology languages like OWL-DL or others cannot even express yet.



They make a case once we have the richness, once we have the annotations, we will be able to do much more! But what that much more is, no one seems to know yet!



To me the whole question of richness and putting more and more semantics looks just odd. Rather then thinking about richness or expressivity - why don't we put effort into which problem space do we want to solve? Why don't we build and show a small mini semantic web from small mini ontologies and show it can do that particular task well. And then build a case, as this mini semantic web can do things x and y but not z, so we need this level of richness. Working other way round looks pure speculation to me.



Some of the semantic applications that I see today, don't yet have a strong appeal to make people adapt this technology fast. Semantic Web is lacking strong business application cases, which solves some real practical problems. In my view, one needs to focus on real-life business cases which give a direct (may be small) but benefit to the end user. Secondly we need strong software engineering aspects in Semantic Web Systems. The way SQL databases are used today, or Java based middleware components or Projects like Lucene, we need strong off the shelf components , which developers can use straight off.



For example, if someone wants to today build a website which tracks user behaviour and then analyses his interests and then provide recommendation, then there are very few general purpose components available to help one build this. Anyone who wants to provide such a utility needs to think everything from scratch.



To be able to make applications more intelligent, a strong focus on off the shelf, logic based software engineering components have to be supported.



Semantic Web Vision is grand and I would like to see that happen. Only time can tell about what it achieves. A small mini semantic web is what we need sooner rather than later!

Varun's Blog

One of my good friend, Varun started blogging today! Read his blog at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/varun Three cheers for him.

I didn't expect him to start writing his blog!



Especially I couldn't imagine seeing entries about java on his blog. Didn't expect that from a "kernel" guy. Perhaps this has been the affect of me giving too many java lessons to him lately:-)



Keep on writing the blog. Cheers.

Sunil

How many countries have you visited?

World66 has a nice service which generates an image, you just need to click the countries that you have visited.



Earlier, I included the image on the same page, but need to change it. Destroyed the layout of the page.

So you can see image at this link.



http://www.world66.com/myworld66/visitedCountries/worldmap?visited=ATFRDEGRITNLUKVAIN


create your own visited country map

or write about it on the open travel guide

RSS on Instant Messenger

Feld has a blog on a company called MesssageCast that will be providing content via IM technologies.



MessageCast provides a platform for publishers to provide their content via IM technologies - specifically MSN Alerts. Suddenly, instead of publishing via email, content providers can cause an MSN Alert to appear on your screen. This - of course - is only opt-in - so you (the user) have complete control (and LiveMessage is completely CAN-SPAM compliant).



"Why should the RSS world care" you ask? MessageCast is in beta on their MessageCast Syndication Edition for RSS publishers. To try it - if you are an MSN Messenger user - simply click on my LiveMessage link right here or on the top right side of my blog under Syndicate Me.



Now - MessageCast won't be a replacement for your RSS reader (hopefully it's NewsGator or NGOS Web / Mobile / POP / Media Center Edition). Instead, you'll use MessageCast for your urgent feeds - the one's you want to know about the minute they are posted. MessageCast is provided to the publisher as a service - no software is required and it takes less then five minutes to configure for an RSS feed.



Message Cast is partially funded by Mobius Venture Capital. Message Cast platform enables one to recieve RSS content on IM's , via email and via mobile phones. Complete blog at http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2004/07/livemessage_by.html

RSS- the next steps?

Jeff Jarvis rights in his blog, about what he is missing from RSS tools today and what they must incorporate to grow.



Blog Entry



1. Unique users. If content creators cannot report unique users they cannot get advertising. Period. So RSS readers must set unique-user cookies. Period.



2. Traffic. RSS readers must allow content creators to count displays -- versus just downloads -- of RSS items.



3. Advertising. If content creators cannot put advertising on feeds, they will not give full content and will give only headlines to link back to their sites where they have the ads. But partial feeds are a pain, right? So there's the carrot/stick: Give them ads, they will give you content. That's the way the world works.



4. Brand. I'm adding this one. As a reader, I find it frustrating that I can't see the brand of a feed unless I scroll up on FeedDemon and read the one line atop the the screen. Brand matters to the content creator, of course, but it also can matter to the reader: You want to know what you're reading.



5. Navigation. I'm adding this one, too. But I know I'm not alone here: Like many RSS fans, I use the feeds to alert me that something is new and if it is of the slightest interest, I prefer to read the post on the web page with full functionality. It's a pain to get to that web page now. The easy solution to Nos. 4 & 5 is to include a brand element that is also clickable to the creator's web page.

....

Feeding me -- sending me any kind of content anytime anywhere on any device -- is the promise of this medium in an ever-connected world and RSS will be at the core of that. This is just the beginning.





Companies like NewsGator, FeedBurner and Pheedo appear to do different bits of this world. NewsGator enables one to read the same RSS feeds both on mobile and the PC, NewsGator & FeedBurner let content provider track and Pheedo is trying to handle the RSS Advertising.



We are still missing context and personalization to make the whole experience more effective.

RSS Investment Rises to 3

RSS looks like becoming hot in the venture world. Recently I heard about Newsgator got its first investment with Mobius Venture Capital.

And I tried to dig in a bit more, and found another 2 companies.



- FeedBurner

- RSS Ad network



I knew both of these companies before hand, but surprisingly missed the news about when did they get their investment.

PaidContent contains stories about the investment in RSS and other interesting articles for business models surrounding RSS.



RSS Analytics Firm FeedBurner, startup based in Chicago, has raised a seven figure amount in a first round of venture funding. The funding was done by Portage Ventures, a Chicago based venture firm, and Ed Chandler, the managing director from Portage, has joined FeedBurner's board.



RSS Ad Network: Pheedo, a new San Francisco-based startup focused on developing solutions for advertising within RSS feeds, has received seed funding from Fastlane Ventures. The financing will be used for technology development, and key hires in business development and sales.The company claims it has already signed up big customers. Competitor in the field: RSSAds.

Opera - Browser or Server?

This is bound to be controversial in some cases, but there is'nt much choice for pure browsers for limited mobile handsets. Opera has made an entry into the mobile server market by releasing "Opera Mobile Accelerator", a proxy based server solution that optimizes the data transfer and content for the mobile phones.



After having redefined the mobile Internet experience on handsets with innovations like Small-Screen Rendering, Content Magic and Tags, Opera Software today introduced the latest tool for empowering users to get the most out of their handsets: Opera Mobile Accelerator, a new proxy-based solution that increases rendering speed on mobile devices up to 250%. Opera Mobile Accelerator also reduces the amount of transferred data traffic - thereby drastically reducing users' telecom bill.



Opera Mobile Accelerator entails that all requested Internet traffic passes through an Opera server, where the Web pages are compressed, stripping out all unnecessary elements before they are downloaded to the handset.



"For Opera, extreme speed has always been treated as essential for a good Internet experience," says Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. "Opera Mobile Accelerator is an optional service that further improves the browsing experience on handsets, reduces strain on operators' stretched data networks, while also saving users money on their monthly bills."



Operators that want to offer subscribers fast and cheap Web browsing, while simultaneously reducing the impact of Web browsing on their data network, can license the Mobile Accelerator directly from Opera



Another interesting part of their business model is, they are selling it directly to consumers on a subscription fees model. The other players in this market sell platform directly to carriers.



* 3 months subscription. Price: EUR 12

* 6 months subscription. Price: EUR 20

* 12 months subscription. Price: EUR 30



Complete article is at http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2004/06/09/

PGtGM

Gmail has created a lot of flurry in the email space even though its still in the beta stage. A number of tools are appearing for GMail. And today I saw PGtGM (Pop Goes the GMail). The name looks a bit cryptic but for those people who want to still use both GMail and POP, it will let you use your outlook express for GMail mails!



Pop Goes the Gmail is a program that sits between the http://gmail.com web server and your email client, converting messages from web format into POP3 format that a program such as Outlook Express or Thunderbird can understand.



Screenshots are at this page. http://jaybe.org/screens.htm

Skype PC-2-Phone

Skype launches PC2Phone. The Skype worldwide prices are at this link

https://secure.skype.com/store/help.pricelist.html

Handango inHand

Handango now ships a java client(InHand) for mobiles.





Hanango InHand



Each application has several details you can view on the device, including name, short description, price and screenshot. From within each product description, you can choose to try or buy the application. Product delivery and purchasing are completed directly via the phone so access to a desktop computer is not necessary.



WirelessDevNet carries an article on that http://www.wirelessdevnet.com/news/2004/jun/30/news3.html

Billion Dollar Companies

Paul Allen managing partner of Infobase Ventures writes about subscription based business models for creating billion dollar companies. Here's an entry from his blog:



I have concluded that the best and fastest way to build another billion dollar company (assuming, of course, that MyFamily.com gets a billion dollar market cap someday) is to create a subscription product that one million people will eventually pay $10-20 per month to use. A million customers paying $15 per month would generate $180 million in revenue. If the company had a profit margin of 25% and a P/E ratio of 20, the company's market cap would be $900 million.



Netflix just passed 2 million subscribers and is worth $1.86 billion.



XM Satellite Radio reached 1 million subscribers last October, less than two years after its launch. They are projecting 2.8 million by the end of this year. Market cap: $5.2 billion.



RealNetworks reached 1 million subscribers to its content service by April 2003. Market cap: $1.1 billion.



Classmates.com had 1.6 million subscribers two years ago. (It's privately held).



American Greetings, I believe, got a million subscribers (to its $11.95 per year greeting cards subscription) in less than one year.



There are many more examples of successful subscription services. The question is, is it possible to create new ones that have the potential to generate a million subscribers, or have all the good ideas already been taken?



Complete Story



In wireless sector, except for the carriers, there aren't that strong subscription model based businesses. Can these win over in that market?

NewsGator Investment

Brad Feld writes in his blog for their rationale behind NewsGator investment:



The misperception is that NewsGator is only an Outlook plug-in. While the most popular product from NewsGator is currently their Outlook-based aggregator, what really turned us on when we dug into NewsGator as a potential investment is NewsGator Online Services (NGOS). Greg Reinacker's vision is much broader than simply an RSS aggregator - his goal is to provide RSS content on any device. NewsGator currently provides clients for Outlook, the Web, POP email, mobile devices (web-based and wap), and Microsoft Media Center (how cool is it to get an RSS feed on your TV?).



Following are several examples of how NGOS can be used today:



- I use a Tmoblie Sidekick - made by Danger - as my cell phone and wireless data device (web browser, email, AOL IM, wap browser, calendar). Using NGOS Mobile Edition, I can read my feeds via my web or wap browser on my Sidekick. These subscriptions are synchronized with my desktop, so I don't have to do any set up on my Sidekick - I simply access my services.newsgator.com mobile edition account.



- NGOS has a custom search feed capability. I put in all of my companies as keywords (one per feed) and then get feeds for each company. This is similar to Yahoo! Alerts and Google Alerts, but also searches all of blogworld so I get any postings in these feeds also.



- A NewsGator / Gmail interface exists. Using this, you can route all of your feeds into your Gmail account and take advantage of Google's search technology on your personal feed database.



Now - while Greg's vision is broad and his technical skills amazing - he'd be the first to admit that NewsGator hasn't packaged and promoted their various products in the most effective way. We're already hard at work on this - expect a steady stream of product announcements in the next few months as we roll out new products to more clearly package and expose all of the technologies NewsGator has built. Existing NewsGator customers should expect to benefit broadly from this - we intend to be fanatically loyal to all of our customers - especially our early ones. We're also extremely interested in finding out how people are using NewsGator and NGOS, as well as what they are looking for in the future products.



A services model is one of the strongest model for RSS. Pure clients can get lost in the space. Netscape story reminds us of that very well.

RSS Tools

SocialText has a bunch of good links on RSS tools on their webblog.

- A list of RSS Tools

- Secure RSS - the way RSS is being used for private blogs or feeds using basic HTTP authentication.Silver Orange did an experiment on analysing tools that support secure rss feeds. It can be found here http://labs.silverorange.com/archives/2003/july/privaterss

Just Execute It

Since my university life, I have always been tempted by the Venture world. Having seen the bubble game of the dot com era; rising aspirations, falling hopes - entrepreneurship is not an easy world. Its not for everyone, only for the ones who want to make things happen.



During the dot-com era, everyone used to talk about a "Killer Idea". Few months back I was with some people, they said their intention was mainly towards good ideas. Even though ideas matter but more then the idea, its the "Execution". Ask yourself a question - do you have the capability to execute, do you understand how a business is run? Ideas just come and pass unless someone strong doesn't executes them.



Recently a company called "Auction Drop" got his first funding. The idea is simple, a chain of drop off centers for eBay. People drop off their items for what they want to sell at eBay at some store and rest everything the store handles. You Drop It Off. We Sell It On eBay.



Interestingly this idea has been tried earlier and it failed. A company called "EZSale" founded some years back on the same principle had its fall. Link



So will AuctionDrop win or fail or why did EZSale failed - answer lies in execution!I remember few words from a talk by Vinod Khosla, where he said one has to pursue things religously against all odds.



The moral is even if you have a great idea, you might not be successful. Strength lies in building yourself strong, knowing the ins and outs, understand things well and then Just Execute It!

Douglas Engelbart

Douglas Engelbart - the father of modern day computing systems showed us the way of human computing.



I came to know about this great personality through the hypertext community. I still remember in my university time,I was fascinated by the web when I came to experience it, but I failed to realize the importance of hyperlinking in a wider context. To me it looked to me just like "a href" tag within HTML which I took for granted. But can we imagine the web without links today? They are as synonymous as the web itself.



And from there I made my entry into reading Open HyperDocument System and to Douglas Engelbart.



Can we ever imagine "personal" computing without a mouse, display editing, Outline processing, Video-conferencing, hypermedia, multiple windows, linking, in file object addressing? He is the one who is credited with all and that also way back in 1968!!



In 1968 (an era in which computers were just number crunching machines) he and his team did a landmark demonstration causing shock to everyone. The videos and pictures of this are available and I was myself shocked to see all this in one go. I thought of all these techonologies to have had evolved slowly over a period of time.



Stanford in 1998 organised a symposium on Douglas Engelbart - an Unfinished Revolution. The videos of the symposium are available. Though these are a bit long, but I think they are a must see. Videos



There were a number of interesting talks at the symposium.



I thought everyone would have been blown apart by that demo in 1968. But it's wrong. That era was led by people from Artifical Intelligence and some even thought its just crap, and one should make machines intelligent rather than making machines to be used for knowledge workers. Can we imagine that today?



One of the presenters highligted the effect between fast and slow movements. Fast movements like technology changes fade away fast, Slow changes involving paradigm shifts provide the real continuity on a longer term. We can predict things at 5 year (technology) scale, but can we say how things will be 30 years or 100 years down the line? We can make wild gusesses but it takes a lot to seriously think on that scale!



And the most interesting one was: Can we have a Moore's Law on Organizational capability ?



Douglas Engelbart's aim was not to make technology to show document editing or the like but to make computers in a way which increases the collaborative capability of humans to be more productive. This is what we still miss to a large extent even today.



We live in a world where computing is still data crunching but on a different scale. We live in set paradigms and are bound by set paths. We stil need to work out what do we require for providing intutive interfaces for humans which anyone can use and at the same time increase our productivity.



With more digital mobile devices penetrating our world, we need to work more effectively rather than replicating the PC model on these devices.

Robot with a Human Face

Last year, I was just sitting lazily on my bed watching news, when a particular news item shook me a bit up. It was one of the most interesting thing that I had seen in robotics. A Robotic Human Head mimicing human expressions of a person who is sitting in front of the head. Today I just tried to find and got it in one go.



The article The Man Who Mistook His GirlFriend for a Robot in Popular Science describes the process in detail. You can also find videos at this link .

Digital Pens - Can they comeback?

A recent article in bbc news shows sony laboratories in Tokyo enable one to pick and pass information enabling swapping/sharing of information amongst digital devices.



Pick and drop'



Dr Rekimoto's lab has extended the drag and drop technique used in most PC software to create a 'pick and drop' technique.



So the owner of a handheld computer can pick up a file from their device, using a special pen, and drop it onto the screen of another computer, by placing the pen on its screen.



These technologies are very interesting for truly intuitive interaction Ian McClelland, Philips. He refers to this approach as 'direct manipulation'. It allows people to visually select and move information in physical space, rather than having to understand abstract concepts of networks and servers.



The pick and drop technique would make it easy for two colleagues in a meeting to exchange files between their laptop computers, new acquaintances to pass each other electronic business cards, or friends to swap references to websites or music tracks they like.



Another technique that the labs has developed is referred to as 'pick and beam'.



This uses displays projected onto tables and walls, using data projectors, that act as extended working spaces.



Documents can be dragged using a special pen from a computer desktop into these spaces. There they can be spread out or exchanged, allowing people to work with them almost as if they were paper documents.