Friday, February 26, 2010
How Mobile Payment methods work in Social Networking and Online Games
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Mobile payment methods are becoming more and more popular these days. During last 1 year online games and social networking platforms like facebook have promoted mobile payment methods.
On facebook you can purchase virtual goods paying from your mobile phones.
According to to a research by Justin Smith (Founder, Inside Network) the market on alone virtual goods on the internet was over $1 billion in the year 2009. Different gaming website let you pay through your mobile phones
Mobile payment is becoming more popular due to its fast transaction speed. Over 70% of the global online audience does not have a credit card, but most all of them have a mobile phone. All your user needs is a mobile phone to make a payment.
Its more secured (till now, as no major security breach has been reported ) and more faster than credit card payment system.
The process of mobile payment is as easy as:
1. Enter your mobile number and click on Payment button on any mobile payment enabled site
2. A message pops up in your mobile with the secret pin
3. Enter that pin back to the Text box provided on the same website and you are done
-You will be charged in your next mobile phone bill.
There are different companies emerging these days who provide software and infrastructure for mobile payment to websites and other businesses.
One such Company is Zong.
According to Zong :
Zong is the leading mobile payment service used for monetizing Web audiences in the social media and gaming industries. Zong gives you a new way to expand your customer base by providing an easier way to pay. Zong provides frictionless payment service in leading social networking applications, virtual worlds and in online games.
This video will help you understand how fast and easy is mobile payment system-
Zong's frictionless user experience gets real results. Our customers have seen conversion rates skyrocket after adding Zong as a payment option. No billing address, no expiration date, no 16-digit card number to type. Just type something you know by heart: your mobile number.
Currently Zong is providing services in 26 countries partnering with the mobile service providers of those countries.
Wikipedia has a good article on Mobile Payment that can be read here
One of the other notable mobile payment system is paymate (http://www.paymate.co.in).
According to Paymate:
PayMate lets you link your mobile to an existing bank account, credit card or pre-paid voucher and use your mobile to make secure payments anywhere, anytime!Features of paymate include
Convenient - Pay online, offline, or from just about anywhere.
Secure - 2-factor PIN authentication keeps you in control.
Easy - Works on any basic mobile handset or operator.
Free - PayMate’s services are free with no hidden costs!
MCheck [http://www.mchek.com] is another Mobile payment system provider in India.
These are few other mobile payment and allied service providers:
Where should I place Google ads on my pages?
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Read a good article on Google Help to know -Where should I place Google ads on my pages?
The concept is based on -identifying the place on the webpage where visitors click most as their eye sight concentrate on those locations:
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=17954
Wikipedia also has a good article on heat map here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_map
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Difference in Websites and Web Applications
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- A Web site is typically designed for casual or infrequent usage by individuals who often do not know, or do not even want to know, too much about the deeper mission of your organization.
- A Web application, such as an HR Intranet or portal that a company provides to its employees, is a very different system that must be optimized for a different use case.
It's important to make a clear distinction between Web sites and Web applications for three reasons:
- To define what the site or system is optimized to do
- To identify how the user is going to approach the features that are being made available
- To pinpoint which specific use cases your designers and developers must create and test
For Web sites, consider that most users are coming through a search engine or by browsing the Web. If they are not able to quickly and easily find what they're looking for, they usually take off. The most common example would be a marketing focused, "brochure" Web site. Casual site visitors like to ease into getting to know your company and will rarely take the time to learn all of your products in their first interaction with your site.
Designing an interface that is easy to browse and navigate should be a high priority. Marketing Web sites that are difficult to navigate, or those that have poor search interfaces, experience high abandon rates, poor pull-through and fail to meet marketing goals.
Web applications are different in that their users are likely coming with a very specific goal in mind. Taking the HR portal example a bit further, consider that some of your HR staff believes that employees like to browse the HR resources available to them. Based on that assumption, they design a content-rich Web site that offers company information, articles of interests, special employee discounts, etc. In fact, the more likely scenario is that employees only tap the HR Intranet when they have to fill out a vacation request, or to update their benefits information, etc. Because these activities are performed less frequently, it's important that they be optimized for usability.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Video Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Guidelines
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I found an excellent article on Video Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Guidelines at the Blinkx website. Blinkx is one of the best video search engines on the Internet. Below is the summary of what I read.
According to the article-
This growth in high-speed access has created unprecedented consumer demand in Internet-distributed rich media and, as a result, advertisers and content producers are rapidly diverting focus from text to video-based content. In addition to content from traditional providers, user-made rich media is also on the rise. In early 2008, YouTube had grown to over 4 million videos, according to comScore. Video content is not just being created—it is being watched by millions. Nearly 140 million users in the US watched video online, streaming approximately 11.5 billion videos in the month of March 2008 (comScore).
First generation video search solutions depended entirely on metadata. Including examples are SingingFish, Altavista Video (now used at Yahoo!).
Metadata is the textual data that is applied to a piece of multimedia content in order to describe it and can include user-provided tags, an editorially written title or summary, a transcript of the speech in the video or even information stored in the video file itself pertaining to its resolution, frame-rate and creation date.
Second generation video search engines use methods such as speech recognition, visual analysis and recognition and video optical character recognition to allow software to listen to, watch and read the text appearing on the video content itself.
As well as providing more information, this approach provides objective information—if a video contains speech on a particular topic, it really is about that topic, whereas if a video has been tagged as pertaining to a certain topic, it may, actually be about something entirely different.
Few Facts I read in the article:
Metadata is often lost during conversion
Not only should you create metadata, but you should also apply it each and every time your content goes onto a new service or is converted to a new format. Just because your .mov had great metadata stored in it, there’s no guarantee that YouTube won’t ignore it if you upload it to their service
Title and description
Titles and descriptions are the text most commonly applied to videos. If a video is hosted on a structured hosting or sharing site such as YouTube, insert this information in the provided specified title and description fields. If hosting on your own website, the title and description will usually be extracted based on proximity. In order to best represent your content on generic sites, it is advisable to have just one video per page with a simple textual title and description placed near the video itself. In the case of links to the video or other tags, it is advised to use anchor text as well.Filename
If you are linking to a specific file that is hosted on a web server, ensure the filename is a sensible and descriptive one, ideally with hyphens or some other form of separating character in between words. For example, use “climate-talks-video.wmv” rather than “videofile.wmv” or “climatetalksvideo.wmv”.
Tags
Tags are growing as a facet of search and navigation, both for video and the Internet as a whole. If you use a video sharing or hosting system such as YouTube, you will generally be given the opportunity to provide tags (and are strongly encouraged to do).Sitemap:
Most video search engines allow the provision of a sitemap, starting-point URL or RSS feed. This invitation should absolutely be taken advantage of and used to provide the engine with a simple list of URLs that point to individual pages that host video.RSS and Media RSS
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is an-XML based standard for publishing time-oriented feeds of information. Considered outside the remit of this paper, the RSS specification can be found at http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification.
Media RSS (MRSS) is an extension to standard RSS that allows any content publisher to widely distribute multimedia content descriptions and links across the Web. In addition to providing standard media metadata, MRSS enhances RSS 2.0 enclosures to handle media types such as video shorts and television clips (Yahoo! Search Media RSS FAQ). From the point of view of SEO, MRSS and RSS are used as a language in which to describe your video to the video search engines.
Format
Deciding on a format for your video content can be a critical decision to make with regard to how the content is going to be used. However, it makes little obvious difference to Video SEO.
Online video application stack
What is Closed Captioning ?
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Closed Captioning is a term used to inform that a video has some other information (in form of captions) that the user can view by activating them (by clicking or so). A video with Closed Captioning can be identified with the “CC” icon at the top or bottom of the video.
This term is widely used in Television, IP video, Internet video.
According to Wikipedia:
Closed captioning is a term describing several systems developed to display text on a television or video screen to provide additional or interpretive information to viewers who wish to access it. Closed captions typically display a transcription of the audio portion of a program as it occurs (either verbatimor in edited form), sometimes including non-speech elements.
The term "closed" in closed captioning indicates that not all viewers see the captions—only those who choose to decode or activate them. This distinguishes from "open captions" (sometimes called "burned-in" or "hardcoded" captions), which are visible to all viewers.
Watch a video to understand what is closed captioning:
Read here : On television, how does closed captioning work?
According to fcc.gov
Closed captioning allows persons with hearing disabilities to have access to television programming by displaying the audio portion of a television program as text on the television screen.
Read a good Article describing what are Captions in reference of videos:
Web Captioning Overview
Captions are text versions of the spoken word. Captions allow the content of web audio and video to be accessible to those who do not have access to audio. Though captioning is primarily intended for those who cannot hear the audio, it has also been found to help those that can hear audio content and those who may not be fluent in the language in which the audio is presented….
Caption as seen on DVD
Caption as Seen in Media Player on Computer
All about Meta Search Engines
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Metasearch Engines
When you perform a search on Google, the results that you get are all from, well, Google! But metasearch engines have been around for years. They allow you to search not only Google, but a variety of other search engines too - in one fell swoop.
In a meta-search engine, you submit keywords in its search box, and it transmits your search simultaneously to several individual search engines and their databases of web pages. Within a few seconds, you get back results from all the search engines queried. Meta-search engines do not own a database of Web pages; they send your search terms to the databases maintained by search engine companies.
A meta-search engine is a search tool that sends user requests to several other search engines and/or databases and aggregates the results into a single list or displays them according to their source
Read a good articles on Search Engines and Meta Search Engines here at SSIR.
Meta-search engines send a user's query to multiple search engines and blend the top results from each into one overall list. A final step can involve clustering the combined results, but both meta-search and regular search engines can be clustered, so the clustering issue is separate. It’s been claimed that meta-search is inherently worse than regular search engines. We assert the contrary: meta-search has intrinsic advantages that are based on voting.
Hear is listed few popular Meta Search Engines:
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I found metacca’s results good and is loaded with features!
Metacca is a very powerful meta-search engine that simultaneously searches all the most popular engines such as Yahoo, Google, Live, AOL, LookSmart, Visvo, dmoz, Inktomi, Altavista, Alltheweb, and over 100 other leading search engines in the categories of Web, Images, News, Shopping, Videos, and FTP to deliver the most comprehensive and relevant results possible.
-As claimed by themselves!
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Zampmeta categorizes your search query, this helps finding the write thing you wanted to search! Additionally it lets you search within different TLDs (top level domains), e.g. .com, .edu or .biz
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Myriad Search from the SEO Book
http://tools.seobook.com/authority-finder/
Clusty Search Engine
Article by: Sumit Pranav.
Sumit Pranav is a search technology expert based in New Delhi, India. He has done extensive studies and research on Search Engines, its algorithms and the search engine marketing models. He holds rewards from Microsoft for his research Project called ECIGS (Educational Content Identification and Grabbing System)
Live Plasma - A map based search engine for Holywood Music and movies
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Wednesday, February 17, 2010
The Myth of DPI
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The size of an image in a website layout is important. From proper alignment to getting just the right amount of white space, sizing photos and graphics properly beforehand is essential to creating a balanced look.
Images on the web are measured in pixels. Yet many people go through the trouble of setting their images to 72 dots per inch (DPI). The process of sizing them is often misunderstood.
The misconception about resolution in digital images, especially ones bound for the web, is that they must meet a certain number of dots per inch.
This is not true. On the web, DPI doesn’t matter.
When someone converts an image to 72 DPI, they’re adding an extra step with no benefit. Web pages are measured in pixels, not real-world units such as inches.
When someone asks you for a web image that’s, say, two inches wide, they’re estimating how it would appear on their own monitor. Without changing the image’s pixel dimensions, that image would appear larger or smaller on different monitors—and would even look different on the same monitor at a different resolution setting.
Pixel Size Depends on Context
A pixel (which is short for “picture element”) is the smallest unit of measure on a grid displaying a digital image. DPI measures how big those pixels, or dots, are when they’re printed.
The image below is shown in different DPIs.
36 DPI
150 DPI
3,096 DPI
Download and open them in an image editor to see for yourself. All three look the same because they were resized, not resampled.
Resizing Changes DPI, Resampling Changes Pixel Count
There are two ways to enlarge an image: add more pixels or make the pixels larger. Likewise, you can reduce an image’s size by shaving off pixels or shrinking pixels. But shrinking and shaving are two different processes.
Shown above, resizing an image changes the size of its pixels, not its number of pixels. We’re not increasing or decreasing the number of pixels, only changing how large those pixels are when printed. It’s an inverse relationship: images with larger pixels will have a lower DPI.
Shown above, resampling changes the image’s size by increasing or decreasing its number of pixels. Images with more pixels will contain more information and often make for richer graphics.
Web design is concerned with resampling, not resizing, because in a layout every pixel will always be the same size. A web page that measures 800 pixels wide can accommodate images up to 800 pixels wide. Making every pixel wider doesn’t change the fact that the layout can hold only 800 of them.
You can’t make an image appear larger on screen by resizing its pixels, because every pixel on the same screen will always be the same size.
Resizing and Resampling in Photoshop
Photoshop’s Image Size box (Image → Image Size) controls both the resizing and resampling of images.
The “Resample” checkbox changes how many pixels fit into a linear inch—literally the dots per inch. If we turn off resampling, the only way to change the image’s size would be to enlarge its pixels for printing.
With the resampling box left unchecked, changing the DPI would alter the image’s physical size (inches), but not its number of pixels.
An Experiment
Figuring out whether DPI matters on the web can be done by a little experiment. If we alter an image from 300 x 100 pixels at 72 DPI to 300 x 100 pixels at 144 DPI, how many pixels would we have?
- Make an image 300 pixels wide and 100 pixels tall, at 72 DPI.
- Let’s do some math. How many pixels would that be?
- Now resize the image to 300 x 100 pixels at 144 DPI.
- Let’s do some more math. How many pixels is that?
The answers are:
- 300 x 100 = 30,000
- 300 x 100 is still 30,000
Pixels per Inch
The number of pixels per inch is still relevant online, but DPI settings do not affect how an image is displayed.
Computer monitors can be physically measured in inches, and each displays a certain number of pixels. For example, let’s say a 19″ monitor shows 1280 x 1024 pixels. The user could change it to display 1600 x 1200 pixels, thus increasing its PPI (i.e. adding more pixels in the same number of inches.)
You can try this on most modern computers. On a Mac, go to Apple Menu → System Preferences, and then click on “Displays” to see the various resolutions at which you can set your monitor. For Windows, right-click on the desktop and select “Personalize,” and then choose “Display settings.” Change the screen resolution (number of pixels) and watch as the items on your Mac or PC desktop get larger or smaller.
Obviously, your monitor isn’t changing in size. But if you hold a ruler to the screen, you’ll see that the size of icons and windows is inversely proportional to the number of pixels displayed. For example, a 13″ laptop, a 17″ CRT monitor and a 21″ flat-panel monitor can all present a desktop that measures 1024 x 768 pixels. More pixels mean smaller icons; fewer pixels mean larger icons. More pixels in the same area give you a higher PPI; fewer pixels give you a lower PPI.
The difference becomes more noticeable with other types of displays:
- A digital billboard measuring 47 x 12 feet might use only 888 x 240 pixels (about 1.6 PPI).
- An iPhone screen today measures 2 x 3 inches and holds 320 x 480 pixels (about 160 PPI).
A single PNG file measuring 100 x 100 pixels would fit on both the 888 x 240 billboard and the 320 x 480 iPhone. But it would appear much larger on the billboard because the board’s PPI is 100 times smaller than the iPhone’s (1.6 vs. 160).
The illustration below shows two devices with different pixel dimensions.
The same image is being shown on two different displays. The differences in PPI make the image on the right-hand display appear larger, even though it has fewer pixels overall.
You can test this yourself:
- Create a JPG that measures 960 x 100 pixels, at any DPI.
- Measure it by hand with a ruler.
- Look at the same image on a computer with a larger or smaller monitor. For example, if you created the image on a 20″ screen, test it on a 13″ laptop.
The result is that this one image would have the same number of pixels but a different width in inches. The website layout would appear in different sizes, despite identical code. (For an extreme case, look at the entire page on an iPhone; 960 pixels is fitted to three inches or less, without the file itself being changed.)
Why 72 is significant
Many file formats, including JPG, TIF and PSD, store an image’s DPI. If you save a JPG at 200 DPI, it will remain at 200.
Other formats, including GIF and PNG, discard DPI. If you save a 200 DPI image as a PNG, it won’t save thatDPI at all. Many image editors, including Adobe Photoshop, assume that an image is 72 DPI if the information is not stored. (Note: Photoshop’s “Save for Web” feature discards unnecessary print information, includingDPI.)
Seventy-two is a magic number in printing and typography. In 1737 Pierre Fournier used units called cieros to measure type. Six cieros were 0.998 inches.
Around 1770, François-Ambroise Didot used slightly larger cieros to fit the standard French “foot.” Didot’s pica was 0.1776 inches long and divided evenly into 12 increments. Today we call them points.
In 1886, the American Point System established a “pica” as being 0.166 inches. Six of these are 0.996 inches.
None of the units ever strayed far from 12 points per pica: 6 picas per inch = 72 points per inch. It was an important standard by 1984, when Apple prepared to introduce the first Macintosh computer. The Mac’s interface was designed to help people relate the computer to the physical world. Software engineers used the metaphor of a desk to describe the arcane workings of a computer, right down to “paper,” “folder” and “trash” icons.
Each pixel on the original Mac’s 9-inch (diagonal) and 512 x 342 pixel screen measured exactly 1 x 1 point. Hold a ruler to the glass, and you’d see that 72 pixels would actually fill 1 inch. This way, if you printed an image or piece of text and held it next to the screen, both the image and hard copy would be the same size.
But early digital pictures were clunky and jagged. As screen technology and memory improved, computers were able to display more pixels on the same size monitor. Matching a print-out to the screen became even less certain when raster and vector apps allowed users to zoom in and examine pixels closely. By the mid-1990s, Microsoft Windows could switch between 72 and 96 pixels per inch on screen. This made smaller font sizes more legible, because more pixels were available per point size.
Today, designers and clients alike understand that the sizes of items on the screen are not absolute. Differences in screen size and zoom functionality are commonplace. But 72 is still the default.
PPI Means Better Legibility at Smaller Point Sizes
Higher PPI is great for legibility. More pixels per inch make letterforms easier to read. It also means that images and text must be larger (in pixels) to be readable.
The text sample above has been resized from two different PPI settings. The top row has smaller pixels (i.e. a higher PPI), so 8 points is the smallest legible font size. Text in the bottom row is barely legible at 10 points.
As PC monitors surpassed the pixel density of Mac monitors in the mid-1990s, websites built on Windows boasted smaller font sizes, much to the dismay of Mac users. Today, screens for both platforms enjoy pixel densities high enough to make the differences moot.
Elastic Web Images With Modern Browsers
We know now that DPI alone doesn’t change an image’s size on the web, and we have no control over which device an image is displayed on. So, are an image’s pixel dimensions the only thing that matters? Yes… for now.
Fluid-width layouts, which change according to the browser’s size, can better accommodate a range of devices and monitors. Modern browsers, from FireFox 3, Safari 3 and Internet Explorer 7 and up, are better than older versions at scaling images on the fly. The max-width CSS property forces images to fit their container but not grow past their actual size. For example:
p { width: 25% } /* A quarter of the content area / img { max-width: 100% }
p { width: 50% } / Half of the content area / img { max-width: 100% }
p { width: 75% } / Three quarters of the content area / img { max-width: 100% }
/ No width set for the paragraph */ img { max-width: 100% }
Here we see one 800-pixel-wide image fit into four different-sized paragraph elements. If the page width were flexible, resizing your browser window would expand the image—but not past its original 800 x 323 pixel dimensions. It would never become distorted, or “pixellated,” from over-expansion.
Preparing images for the web means planning in pixels. If someone asks for a 2-inch graphic for the web, ask them, “How big are your pixels?”
Written exclusively for WDD by Ben Gremillion. Ben is a freelance web designer who solves communication problems with better design.
In which media does resolution count? What’s the best way to size online images? Share your ideas below.
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- Taken from Webdesigner Depot
Google Buzz Tips
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Google Buzz Tips
Here are some tips that help you use Google Buzz in new interesting ways.
1. Send direct messages.
If you'd like to send a private message to someone, type @ and use Gmail's autocomplete feature to find the email address of your contact. After typing the message, make sure that the private option is selected, click on "Post to other groups" and create an empty group. You could call it "No one", "Empty group" etc. Now you can send your message.
When you send a private message, Google Buzz lets you select one or more groups that will receive message, but you can also include the contacts in your message.
2. Disable email notifications.
When someone replies to one of your Google Buzz messages, Google sends an email notification to your Gmail account. If you don't like the notifications or they clutter your inbox, create a filter that archives or deletes all the messages that are labeled "buzz" (a built-in Gmail label). Make sure you typelabel:buzz (you could also use is:buzz) in the "Has the words" box and ignore Gmail's warning.
3. Add more connected sites.
Google Buzz lets you import content from services like Google Reader, Picasa, Blogger, Twitter, Flickr, but it's not obvious how to add other sites. Let's say you want to add your FriendFeed profile or the feed of your site. To do that, you need to make sure that the site links to your Google Profile or to one of the services that are associated with your Google Profile.
Google explains how to add a link to your profile and how to include a special markup (rel="me") that offers more information about the link.
<link rel="me" type="text/html" href="http://www.google.com/profiles/your.username" />
Unfortunately, you can't connect the site immediately after you add the link. Google needs to crawl the site before updating the connections. "When the site is re-crawled the mutual claim will be verified and feeds associated with the site will be made available within Google Buzz for the verified user."
4. Link to a Google Buzz message.
If a message is public, it has a permalink that could be used to share the discussion. Gmail shows the links without having to use additional options, but it's not obvious that the timestamp of the message is actually a permalink.
5. Quickly open Google Buzz.
If you've enabled keyboard shortcuts in Gmail, type g b from any Gmail view and you'll open Google Buzz.
Some other useful shortcuts:
Shift+l - like a message
m - mute (ignore) a conversation
r - add a comment
p / n - go to the newer / older conversation
o - expand conversation
6. Hide Google Buzz's counter.
Google Buzz's message counter is distracting, so it would be nice to hide it. Unfortunately, there's no Gmail option that lets you hide counter, but you can hide the link to Google Buzz. Drag "Buzz" to the "X more" drop-down and you can hide the Buzz label.
7. Subscribe to a Google Buzz account in a feed reader.
Google posts each public message to the user's profile page. Open the profile page and click on the orange icon displayed by your browser to subscribe to the feed. A Google Buzz feed has an address that looks like this:
http://buzz.googleapis.com/feeds/<USERNAME>/public/posted
8. Find public Google Buzz messages.
If you thought that Google Buzz's search box is restricted to your social connections, think again. Google Buzz's search feature shows the latest public messages that match your query.
Some useful searches:
author:<insertname>@gmail.com - find all the messages written by a specific user (you can also use a partial name instead of an email address)
commenter:<insertname>@gmail.com - find all the messages that have a comment from a specific user
has:photo, has:video, has:link - restricts the results to messages that include photos, videos or links (for example: vancouver has:photo)
source:flickr, source:twitter, source:reader- restricts the results to messages imported from Flickr, Twitter, Google Reader (for example: vancouver source:flickr)
9. Save searches
You can bookmark your favorite Buzz searches by enabling the Quick Links feature from Gmail Labs. After performing a search, click on "Add quick link" and add a name for your bookmark.
10. View Google Buzz photos in a slideshow
When you upload photos to Google Buzz, they're added to Picasa Web Albums. If you click on a thumbnail, Google Buzz will open a lightbox to help you quickly navigate between images. Unfortunately, there's no option to view the images in a slideshow, but Picasa Web Albums has this feature and there's a small link that opens the photo album. Click on "view all" and you can select the slideshow option, export photos using Picasa or print photos.
11. Add rich text messages
You can use the same tricks that work in Google Talk to write rich text messages:
*bold message*
_italic message_
-deleted message-
12. Google Buzz on a map
Use the address of the mobile Google Maps interface to see Google Buzz messages from all over the world. There's also a list view for nearby messages.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Use of Purple color in designs
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http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2010/02/11/color-in-design-purple/
Type anywhere in your language using transliteration
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Google Transliteration IME is an input method editor which allows users to enter text in one of the supported languages using a roman keyboard. Users can type a word the way it sounds using Latin characters and Google Transliteration IME will convert the word to its native script. Note that this is not the same as translation -- it is the sound of the words that is converted from one alphabet to the other, not their meaning. Converted content will always be in Unicode.
Google Transliteration IME is currently available for 14 different languages - Arabic, Bengali, Farsi (Persian), Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
Get the software from here:
http://www.google.com/ime/transliteration/
See the installation instructions here:
http://www.google.com/ime/transliteration/help.html#installation
Bricks for Bread and Milk
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Bricks for Bread and Milk
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
VNL, an Indian company, aims to bring solar-powered phone networks to villages
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A single such station would be capable of handling hundreds of users, and needs just two people to set it up. The station can be assembled and mounted on a roof top in the short span of six hours. This small station and others nearby can communicate with a base station withing 5kms (which itself is solar powered). The base station can then communicate with the main network.
The problem with traditional systems is, not only the fact that they need large amounts of power which necessitate the presence of a power grid, but also the cost involved. Traditional systems need customers to spend as much as Rs. 250 to Rs. 300 per month on average to make a profit, which is hard to get in rural areas. Thus their reluctance to provide coverage in such areas. VNL's system requires only as much as Rs. 90 to Rs. 100 per month per person on average from their customers to make a profit.
Currently as many as 50 such stations have been deployed in villages in Rajasthan and there are plans to introduce the technology in Africa. The systems deployed in Rajasthan are voice only, and dont support text or data, as most end users in those areas are cannot read or write.
It is nice to see such an innovation coming from India, and the fact that it can bring voice connectivity to the millions of people in India who are currently without any means of communication is heartening as well.
Read more here: http://www.thinkdigit.com/Mobiles-and-PDAs/VNL-an-Indian-company-aims-to-bring_4027.html
1Gb/second broadband speeds
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Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Software Engineering Glossary from Marketing View
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# ALL NEW -- The software is not compatible with previous versions.
# ADVANCED DESIGN -- Upper management doesn't understand it.
# BREAKTHROUGH -- It nearly booted on the first try.
# NEW -- It comes in different colors from the previous version.
# DESIGN SIMPLICITY -- It was developed on a shoe-string budget.
# EXCLUSIVE -- We're the only ones who have the documentation.
# FIELD TESTED -- Manufacturing doesn't have a test system.
# FOOLPROOF OPERATION -- All parameters are hard coded.
# FUTURISTIC -- It only runs on the next-generation supercomputer.
# HIGH ACCURACY -- All the directories compare.
# IT'S HERE AT LAST -- We've released a 26-week project in 48 weeks.
# MAINTENANCE FREE -- It's impossible to fix.
# MEETS QUALITY STANDARDS -- It compiles without errors.
# OPEN SYSTEMS -- Anything with our logo on it!
Vendor dependent variations of the above definitions of open systems:
# OSF -- Anything IBM& DEC can agree on must be open
# Sun -- Give me an `s', give me a `p', give me an `a', give me an `r', give me a `c' - what have you got? OPEN!
# Microsoft -- Open Systems? Isn't that a laxative?
# IBM - Open systems? We have 13 of them. Which one do you want?
# PERFORMANCE PROVEN -- It works through beta test.
# REVOLUTIONARY -- The disk drives go round and round.
# SATISFACTION GUARANTEED -- We'll send you another copy if it fails.
# STOCK ITEM -- We shipped it once before, and we can do it again, probably.
# UNMATCHED -- It's almost as good as the competition.
# UNPRECEDENTED PERFORMANCE -- Nothing ever ran this slow before.
# YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT -- We finally got one to work.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Amazing Online painting software-sumopaint
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It's full featured, similar to photoshop. Can be extremely useful if the machine you are working on has not photoshop installed.
Its free, developed in flash and flex.
find it here:
http://www.sumopaint.com/app/
here is a screen-shot:
Friday, February 5, 2010
My achievements in videos
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Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Introduction to MySQL on Windows - a must read e-book
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Online store of Good collection of caps of different shapes, colors, style and size..
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Getting list of Fields and associated information from a Table
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Monday, February 1, 2010
Guidelines for Content Optimization and website design
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This text is an extract from a good article :
Content Optimization SEO Articles by Beanstalk