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Amazon - Diapers, Soap and Cloud Computing

When you hear of Amazon what do you usually think of? Place to buy Books, vacuum cleaner, diapers or laptops that can be shipped directly to your home. Plain vanilla, boring e-commerce...... however nothing could be farther from the truth. Amazon over the years has built itself into an obvious e-commerce behemoth which sells shoes to clothes to computers. But not so obviously Amazon has built a mind boggling technology capability with the ability to execute across hardware, software and consumer electronics platforms. 3 years ago, it would have been difficult to believe that Amazon would produce the biggest selling e-reader in history. But with Kindle, Amazon created a top of the line e-reader - a network device with the ability to download content using an always on data connection. It was unprecedented and showed how a network device of the future would behave. Similarly on the enterprise side of things, Amazon was a pioneer in offering commercial cloud computing
Recent posts

Has real-time data killed reliable data?

My Facebook newsfeed never looks the same, it is constantly changing and I am not talking about new posts getting added, it just keeps showing different posts ordered based on some weird Facebook logic. So slowly but surely I have stopped depending on Facebook posts, or tweets as information. People are often posting something, deleting it, editing it and so on. On top of that Facebook/Twitter keeps messing with the ordering and visibility of the posts...sometimes I see all posts by my friends, sometimes I don't. Just a single refresh could change the order and visibility of the posts. It is just not Facebook newsfeed that has this inconsistency problem,  I am the admin of the Picksie Fan page on Facebook - every 2 minutes the number of fans keep changing for no apparent reason without anyone added or removed. Similarly in Twitter, the number of twitter followers, number of tweets or the number of people I am following keeps changing so randomly that I have stopped trying to

Unions - Modern Ball and Chain

As I was reading about the happenings in Wisconsin, I started thinking about the role unions play in our current day economy as well as our society. The more I thought about it, more unconvinced I was about their role. And as if on cue,  I came across this excellent article which clarified my perspective. You could be a conservative or a liberal but there is no questioning the points the author makes. I come from the technology industry which prides itself for being nimble, highly productive, highly customer oriented and highly profitable. In spite of technology being a necessity for any industry, it also is highly volatile with technologies becoming obsolete in a matter of months instead of years.

My scrollbar is broken!

I am thankful for AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) aka the technology behind web browsers' ability to load data dynamically without having to refresh. It has saved us from the thankless task of refreshing our browser endlessly to view any update. If it hadn't been for this technology, web applications would have permanently lagged behind native applications in terms of usability. And I will even go out on a limb and say that maybe even web 2.0 might not have been as robust had it not been for AJAX. However the evolution of AJAX and its omnipresence in web 2.0 has had a few unintended consequences. One of them is the broken scroll bar.

Year of the Tiger

It's been almost 18 months since my last post on the future of technology. Some of my predictions have gained momentum like location based services while some like robotics and 3D gaming are moving rather slowly. Before I go back to the future let's do a quick recap of the past year. A few technology stories and trends that had everybody's attention..

BCB: A reader's comment to my post "Is Google in Trouble?"

" BCB or Blog->Comment->Blog is an idea I had about converting great comments on blog posts or articles into blog posts themselves. This brings great thoughts to the fore that otherwise would just stay stuck in the comments section."     Below is a comment on my original post "Is Google in Trouble??"  from Anonymous.. I get a similar sense at times. Partly because there doesn't seem to be a unified strategy at Google and they seem to be falling into "let's do everything" pattern. Juxtaposed to that is of course something that I do give them credit for: boldly trying different things, however that doesn't cue their "addiction" to ad revenue. Their primary and very much only source of revenue.

I Hear Voices in my Head

I have been playing around with the iPad for a while now, so naturally I started thinking about what its shortcomings were. I realized that probably the weakest link in the iPad is the ability to type on it effectively (yes, I have the keyboard dock..it is just not enough). This in turn hampers your ability to key in search terms, URLs in Safari, mails, tweet, comments in Facebook and so on. Touch interface is great but typing in iPad is not fun.