Posted by Aditya Maru

New Delhi: Imagine how easier life would be for people driving on India’s roads, if they could avoid a traffic situation, a crowded junction, or a road full of potholes, just by using their smartphones.

Microsoft Research (MSR) India, the research arm of Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software firm, is currently researching a software solution, TrafficSense, which will help smartphone users automatically monitor road and traffic conditions while they are on the move. TrafficSense uses different sensors on these phones—radio such as bluetooth or cellular wireless; microphone; global positioning system or GPS; an accelerometer; or even the camera—to help phone users monitor traffic and save time.

TrafficSense is designed to enable users to send information to a central server, where it can be aggregated and results delivered to other customers. “The idea here is to take advantage of mobile phones as sensory devices that can provide real-time information for the benefit of others,” said P. Anandan, managing director of MSR India.

“This requires a way of communicating with the devices. So, while the accelerometer can detect potholes, the microphone can detect the extent of honking in the area, and the camera can provide photographs.”

Work on traffic monitoring has been done for developed countries that have simple traffic flow patterns, but India comes with its set of complexities. “Rich sensing is critical in the context of the cities of the developing world.”

Anandan heads a team of around 55 people in Bangalore, of which 48 researchers currently focus on seven research groups—algorithms, cryptography and security, digital geographies, mobility, networks and systems, multilingual systems, software engineering, and technology for emerging markets.

India-developed solutions recently demonstrated at a Two other MSR Microsoft internal tech fair at its Redmond, Washington, headquarters include SixthSense, which uses radio frequency identification device or RFID-based intelligence to search for objects, and NetPrints, a system that uses shared knowledge among users to help easily configure computer systems.

SixthSense could be a blessing for the chronic absent-minded among us. Though RFID is widely used to track the movement of goods through a supply chain, in this solution it ensures interaction between people and their misplaced personal objects such as books, laptops and mobile phones, or even between people.

In an enterprise that has a good coverage of RFID readers, people and their objects are tagged with inexpensive, passive RFID tags. “SixthSense is a clever way of combining RFID as a sensor with other patterns and behaviour of people,” Anandan said.

Users could also use physical events to index their experiences (for instance, “Was my laptop with me when I received a phone call from person X?”).

By combining mobility information from RFID sensing and information from enterprise systems, SixthSense is able to automatically distinguish between people and objects, learn the identities of people, and infer the ownership of objects by people.

NetPrints, on the other hand, was inspired after the mother of a researcher at MSR frequently called her daughter when her computer had configuration problems such as the instant messenger not working or the browser taking inordinate time to load Web pages. NetPrints is targeted at the home user.

A home network is typically a collection of several devices and applications, creating a rich, diverse and unmanaged network which, more often than not, has to be administered and configured by the home users themselves, and can be a difficult task. When a home user runs into problems, they either ask a friend to fix it, or look online for solutions, or call technical support personnel. This manual process could not only take up a significant amount of time, it also causes immense frustration to the home user.

“NetPrints leverages shared knowledge in a population of users to diagnose and resolve misconfigurations. Basically, if one user has figured out the fix for a problem, we would like this knowledge made available to another user experiencing the same problem,” Anandan said.

NetPrints automatically records and totals configuration information from a large population of users, looks up the suitable information when a new client experiences a similar problem, and suggests configuration changes to resolve the problem.

“All our research is derived from the societal problems facing the region. All our six labs (in the world) work together, but in India, we tend to pay more attention to projects like TrafficSense, SixthSense and NetPrints. India and China tend to see more innovations for emerging markets.”

All the three projects are still in the laboratory and have not been tested in the field. “All these projects are ongoing with initial results. In the case of NetPrints and SixthSense, we are in some discussions with product groups (within Microsoft) on the technology transfer for some areas. We have seen transfers happening in a week and some in five years,” Anandan said.

Contributed by Nivedana Jalan

An odd couple takes a bite from the same apple:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/15/arts/design15.php?page=1

To read the full article, visit the following website.

http://knowledge.smu.edu.sg/article.cfm?articleid=1165

‘Locomi’ is a new facebook application developed by Ravi Bhushan along with You-At. Ravi is an SMU graduate and former Ventures V-P. You-At is an India-based firm looking to develop location based services for Asian markets. Here is the description of the application as it appears on Facebook.

Here is the Facebook link for downloading the app.

The following article talks about a website which links up borrowers and lenders and takes a cut (comission) for facilatating the transactions. So if you guys have excess money, you can use the following websites to lend. Or if you need urgent financing, you know where to look! Read on to find out more….

Posted by Aditya Maru

From The Economic Times

WASHINGTON: Saddled by student loans and credit card debt, Ryan Little was looking for relief. Like many, the 30-year-old insurance agent turned towards banks for a loan but he ended up finding a much better deal elsewhere, on the Internet, through a website called Lending Club ( www.lendingclub.com ). Little eventually borrowed 10,000 dollars from 30 people he didn’t know and had never met through Lending Club, a “peer-to-peer” or social lending network.

“The rates between the banks that I’ve looked at are anywhere from five to seven per cent more than it is with Lending Club,” Little said. 

“It ends up being quite a significant amount of money depending on how much you are looking to get per year,” he said. “I would say overall in three years it’s probably going to save me about 3,000 dollars in interest payments alone.” 

The Sunnyvale, California-based Lending Club, which began as a Facebook application in May 2007, is one of a number of peer-to-peer, or P2P, lending operations operating on the Internet. They work somewhat like an online auction site; people looking for a loan set the maximum interest rate they are willing to pay and lenders bid against one another to make the best offer.

Little got a three-year loan at an interest rate of 12.6 percent. He pays back 330 dollars a month to Lending Club which redistributes the money among his backers and earns its money through transaction fees. 

Elizabeth Colglazier, a lawyer and mother of two, has loaned more than 3,300 dollars to 41 people through the San Francisco-based peer-to-peer firm Prosper (prosper.com). 

Perched on a stool in her kitchen, her eyes locked on her computer screen, she scanned the list of the people to whom she has lent money. 

“That’s the first I ever bid on,” she said. “I picked this one out because it’s a family who started their own business geared towards children and it sounded like they had a good business plan and it was going to work out.” 

To help them decide who to lend money to, lenders are supplied with a photo of the borrower, their financial records and the reasons they need the money. 

The maximum loan is 25,000 dollars repayable over three years. 

Colglazier’s loans vary from 50 to 100 dollars. When they seem risky, she’ll hike her interest rates, as much as 22 percent for a 50-dollar loan. 

“I chose this listing because she had an emergency room bill to pay and I thought that was a good cause,” she said. “I enjoy doing this. I feel that I am helping other people in addition to getting a great return on my money. 

“I do realize that it’s risky but any investment you make is going to be risky. So why not actually see who you are lending to and make choices based upon what they are doing with the money.” 

The companies that run the P2P sites verify the identities and solvency of the borrowers but they do not offer any recourse in case of default. 

“That’s the key,” said Chris Larsen, chief executive of Prosper. “It’s up to people to decide whether to accept to lend money to borrowers.” 

Late payments are penalized and the identities of deadbeat borrowers are passed on to the companies which assign all-important credit scores. 

“You have to treat this as a speculative environment where the chance of default is somewhat high,” said John Vyge, a financial planner for Hillebrand Financial Planning. “I mean, you are lending to other individuals. You don’t have a banking system backing you up or backing up a loan.” 

Until recently, Americans had become used to easily obtaining money at low interest rates, he said. But the credit crunch and current financial crisis have changed all that and they’re now looking for other sources. 

Prosper’s Larsen said his firm, founded just two-and-a-half years ago, has 800,000 users and has facilitated a total of 175 million dollars in loans. 

Among Colglazier’s 41 borrowers is her boyfriend. 

He needed 9,000 dollars and she lent him 1,000, at an interest rate of just two percent. It’s the largest sum she’s ever lent out and the lowest interest rate. 

“It really takes the pressure off the relationship,” she said. “My boyfriend is on a payment schedule that doesn’t require my involvement. 

“Of course I will probably take him out to dinner or something with the interest he pays me!”

Posted by Aditya Maru

22 Sep, 2008, 1259 hrs IST, REUTERS

CANBERRA: Social networking sites are the hottest attraction on the Internet, dethroning pornography and highlighting a major change in how people communicate, according to a Web guru.

“There are some patterns to our Internet use that we tend to repeat very specifically and predictably, from diet searches, to prom dresses, to what we do around the holidays,” Tancer told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Society clicks to change

Posted by Aditya Maru

Posted by Aditya Maru

http://weburbanist.com/category/guerilla-marketing/

Here is an article which provides an insight into the entrepreneurship climate in Russia.

Posted by Aditya Maru

By Steven Pearlstein

Wednesday, July 11, 2007; Page D01

MOSCOW Most Russians know plenty about Roman Abramovich, the 41-year-old former commodities trader who parlayed his interest in former state oil and aluminum companies into an $18 billion empire that includes England‘s Chelsea soccer team and the governorship of the Arctic province of Chukotka, where reindeer outnumber people.

And they know all about Mikhail Prokhorov, 42, Russia‘s nickel czar, who caused a minor diplomatic incident this year when police raided his infamous Orthodox Christmas bashes at a French ski resort after receiving reports that he’d flown in private planeloads of Russian prostitutes for the event.

But few Russians have ever heard of Anatoly Karachinsky or Arkady Volozh, who are as close as it comes to a local Bill Gates or Sergei Brin.

One reason is that they have received little, if any, attention from the Russian media, in particular television news operations, which are known to demand payment for favorable company coverage.

And neither man has yet to pass into the ranks of Russia’s billionaires, despite the runaway success of the technology companies they founded — Karachinsky’s IBS Group, the country’s largest software company and the first to have its shares listed on Western stock exchanges, and Volozh’s Yandex, which is the rare Internet search engine that has managed to maintain a dominant position in its home market against an aggressive push from Google.

“There is no tradition or concept of entrepreneurial success, and this is a big issue for us,” Karachinsky told me. “The stories people tell are of criminals or failures. There simply are no business heroes in this country.”

By right, it ought to have been Russia, not India, that rode the technology sector up the development curve. This is a country, after all, of nearly 100 percent literacy, with a scientific community rich in mathematicians, physicists and engineers who in the past were able to develop nuclear weapons, supersonic jets and sophisticated spy satellites, and who pioneered space travel. The telecommunications infrastructure, at least in the big cities, is remarkably advanced. And wages have been comfortably below those of Europe or the United States.

But several factors conspired to create a slow start for the Russian technology sector.

The technology know-how was trapped in bloated, inefficient state companies and bureaucracies. And although many of those firms have been privatized, they have been stubbornly slow in adopting the latest information technology to drive down costs and boost productivity.

“It will take a very long time before Gazprom has information systems comparable to Shell,” says Karachinsky, who has a number of contracts with subsidiaries of the state-owned natural gas monopoly.

And while Russians excel at the theoretical side of science, Western executives tell me they are less skilled in managing complex projects and applying their scientific knowledge to practical business applications — vital skills for a modern software industry.

Also hampering development of the Russian high-tech sector is the lack of a reliable system for protecting intellectual-property rights. What copyright and patent laws that exist can be easily avoided or manipulated, with the help of judges who are corrupt and a court system that is largely incapable of dealing with complex intellectual-property litigation.

Certainly that is the experience of Microsoft, which asserts that piracy of its software is rampant here, and Motorola, which has been prevented from selling some of its cellphones because of claims that it violates Russian patents, and several pharmaceutical companies that have identified Russia as the source of counterfeit drugs.

Recently, a number of local high-tech executives were able to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin to spend a day of his trip to India in Bangalore to convince him of the need to develop a similar technology cluster in one of Russia’s university towns. Putin appeared to be taken by the possibilities, but since then the initiative seems to have been put on the back burner by a state bureaucracy that sees a much bigger payoff for the country, and itself, from booming natural-resource industries.

And therein lies the biggest challenges to the development of an entrepreneurial business culture in Russia, even in sectors like high-tech that are relatively free of government interference or the unwanted attentions of expansion-minded corporate oligarchs. In theory, all that’s needed is talent and investment capital, both of which are plentiful in Russia. But as long as huge rewards can be earned buying and selling natural resource assets, the most skilled and ambitious Russians are probably not going to opt for the hard work, uncertainty and long time required to build a business from scratch.

And as long as investors can reliably make 40 or 50 percent annual returns by investing in state-owned enterprises or companies controlled by politically favored oligarchs, it doesn’t make much sense for anyone to assume the significant greater risks of venture capital investing for similar or even smaller returns.

This crowding-out effect became all too clear to me as I sat in the cafeteria of the Higher School of Economics here speaking with half a dozen undergraduates about their goals and aspirations. None expressed much interest in starting his or her own business, or saw that as the preferred route to fame or fortune. The most common aspiration was to get a job in one of the government’s economic ministries, where good salaries and the possibility of bribes or kickbacks make it possible to earn a comfortable living, or make contacts that could lead to an even better job with an oligarch or a state-owned enterprise.

“We have something wrong with our business culture,” said 20-year-old Alexei Yurtaev, the son of a university professor who came to Moscow from his hometown in the Urals. “Success is dependent more on how close you are to politicians than it is on economic considerations. Certainly you can have a very small business and devote your life to it. But if you have ambitions to create a big and successful company, you have to face the question of how the government will treat you.”

Three or four years ago, students would probably have said the future was with the private corporations, big international companies and even start-ups. That they now perceive that their best bet is to find a way into the state-run “power structure” is a step backward in the development of Russian capitalism.

Contributed by Pawan Gupta

How Do Search Engines Rank Pages (or your web-site)?

Before you try to add your site to the search engines, you should understand what they look for when they decide how to rank your site. Just because you’re listed doesn’t mean you’ll get traffic.  You have to make sure your site is search engine ready.

The general rule of thumb is that most engines use a “formula” to determine keyword relevancy. The technical term is called an “algorithm”, and each search engine has its own unique algorithm that it uses to rank pages.  

Generally, this magic formula consists of your page title, overall body content and the number and quality of links pointing back to your site, how long people stay on your site, etc.

It’s important to note that every engine is different. Some may look at inbound links (number of people linking to you), others may place more  emphasis on your body content.  These days, meta tag content is becoming less and less important. (meta tags are pieces of code in a page which give more information about the page, like author, date of creation, purpose of document, contact no., etc etc)

In case you don’t know, meta tags are hidden descriptors that appear at the beginning of your HTML code, inside your <head> tag.  They may be invisible to your visitor’s eyes, but search engine spiders can read them.

They usually consist of a title, description, and keyword tag and they look something like this:

<head>

<title>Title of Your Site</title>

<meta name=”description” content=”Description of your site here.”>

<meta name=”keywords” content=”keywords separated by commas”>

</head>

Because of abuse, many search engines no longer use these tags to help rank pages, but you should still include them because they do use them to display information about your site. For example, whatever is inside the <title> tag is what the search engine will use as the title of your site in the search results.