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 .