Google seems quite invincible at its numero uno position as the preferred way to search for information on the web. Then Wikipedia came along with tons of community edited “articles” that is in many ways more comprehensive and concise that visiting several Google links on any subject. Similar in spirit to Wikipedia is Freebase - Freebase is an open database of the world’s information. Freebase is also maintained by a community.  The difference lies in the way FreeBase stores information. Wikipedia arranges information in the form of articles. Freebase lists facts and statistics. Freebase’s list form is good not only for people who like to glance at facts, but also for people who want to use the data to build other web sites and software (via an API).

And Parallax, is an interface on top of Freebase that makes it easy to navigate through a lot of data to arrive at information sets (related information). This video on Parallax is very illuminating and a must see. With Parallax, the promise of the semantic web is coming closer.

Search based user experience is rapidly becoming the norm. This is validated by Microsoft’s new release of “Search Commands” for Microsoft Office 2007.

In the 2007 version, Microsoft replaced the aging “menu” navigation system with a new “Ribbon” (or Fluent) interface. I quite liked the Fluent interface and think it is a great step in the right direction towards making information workers more productive. Now, Microsoft Office Labs has provided a “search” interface in-built into the Office 2007 Ribbon. So you can find commands, options, wizards, and galleries in Microsoft Office 2007 Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Just type what you’re looking for in your own words and click the command you need. Great tool for keyboard junkies.

News

Adobe unveiled Acrobat.com, an online suite that allows you to create word processing documents, share files, convert PDFs and hold Web conferences.

Analysis

On first glimpse, Acrobat.com looks really snazzy and bests other online productivity suites such as Google Docs and Zoho. The online suite supports Acrobat 9 which was also announced on Monday. Acrobat 9 now includes support for Flash and is in some ways the culmination of Adobe’s Macromedia acquisition. The killer application in the suite is ConnectNow, the collaboration tool. ConnectNow allows people to collaborate, share screens and work together and should help companies reduce travel (be more green).

Strategic Impact

In some ways, Acrobat.com is a late entrant in this space with Google being the current favorite. Besides, Acrobat is still far from a complete productivity suite and does not have spreadsheets and presentation programs. Even Microsoft has OfficeLive Spaces that allows users to collaborate and share documents online. Besides OfficeLive is well integrated with Microsoft Office suite.

Recommendation

Admittedly Acrobat.com has the easiest user interface and that should help drive adoption. That coupled with the wide deployment of Acrobat and Flash should make it an easy learning curve for users. But with an incomplete stack and no compelling features that are currently not offered by competitors, users are advised to wait and watch.

Way back in the 80’s, disk capacity was limited (and costly) and hence most enterprise operating systems of that era such as Unix systems employed disk quotas to limit the amount of space that any user could enjoy. However with huge advances in storage technology and rapidly falling costs, it is common to see 160 GB disks even in home computers and storage is no longer a scare resource. Google and many others including Rediffmail offer unlimited online storage. So having the disk quota feature is not as compelling now.

However given that enterprises are increasingly becoming conscious of and accountable for their impact on the environment, technologies that align with "green IT" - such as reduced paper consumption will become common. Enter printer quotas – that will limit the number of pages that a user can print in a day. This will serve to conserve paper utilization whilst controlling costs. Interestingly, none of the leading Operating systems have support for print quotas out-of-the-box and will need third-party software such as PaperCut, PyKota and PrintUsagePro to enforce print quotas. In addition to such print quota software, enterprises can also consider special printer software such as FinePrint that will further optimize printer usage by saving ink, paper, time and money thru controlling and enhancing printed output.

Here is to a greener world ! 

Ever since Google appeared on the search scene other players have slowly diminished in importance and with good reason. Despite naysayers, Google continues to have all the features that made it the favorite, viz: speed, relevance, large index, open APIs and more.

So does that mean that there are no innovations on the search front? Well, start-ups such as Majestic, Faroo and YaCy are all set to introduce peer to peer (P2P) technology based search. A P2P based search will shift the power away from large search companies to the user. No longer is the search and indexing capability limited to the number of servers that your search engine has, a P2P search tool can leverage all the interconnected computers on the Internet running the software.

All you need is to download and install a P2P search tool like the ones listed above and you are set. Such tools typically crawl the web and index it locally. The search index is shared with other “peers” (with full security and privacy). So a search is made against the shared indexes across hundreds of computers. This technology seems to hold a lot of promise and will scale as content on the Internet grows.

As people swim in ever increasing volumes of email, a new bunch of start-ups are trying to make your email experience better. This is part 2 of my earlier post on the same topic.

ClearContext has a free Outlook add-in that helps you to organize and deal with email in a much more efficient manner. One innovative feature is the Attachment explorer that gives an Explorer-like view of all the attachments in your Inbox. They also have a paid version that allows email to be treated like “projects”.

ZenBe offers an integrated experience to users so that all your email, calendars, contacts, etc appear in one single view. ZenBe is extensible, allowing you to add modules from third parties. See what your Facebook friends are up to at a glance, chat with your Gtalk buddies, scan your favorite RSS feeds, all without leaving your email.

It is becoming more apparent that the worlds of Email and Social Networks are converging and Fuser is a nice way to manage all your online communications within one window. So you simply login to Fuser and it automatically gets all your inboxes from FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, etc to an unified inbox.

Orgoo takes the single email experience to the extreme and allows all your emails, instant messages, SMS, video chats and more to come together into one unified experience.

MessageDance takes another approach to content creation. MessageDance is a platform for sharing digital content and conversations from your social sites and through email. Publish just once and your content will be shared to all of the places you hang out.

If you thought GMail was pushing the envelope on web interface design, then think again. Slimail is a service that enhances the Gmail experience with new capabilities like streaming video, no duplicate emails and attachments, etc.

Orla is an Outlook add-in that helps organize and manage your time better. They have an innovative Ditch, Deal, Delegate and Decide toolbar that allows users to prioritize email.

Xoopit mines your Inbox and lets you find pictures, video and files that you can share with YouTube, flickr, shutterfly, Kodak and Picasa. Xoopit works with both GMail and iGoogle.

Over the next year or so, we can expect future versions of popular web mail and desktop email clients to also start having some of the above features.

Open Source Software (OSS) has started making inroads into business applications in a big way. So far, OSS has never been perceived as a serious alternative to SAP, Oracle and Microsoft business solution simply because the business and domain knowledge required to develop such software was often missing in the traditional OSS “hackers”.

But all this is set to change and there are several viable OSS alternatives to commercial business applications now. So far (IMHO), the leader of this pack seems to be OpenERP. Sporting a Web 2.0 interface as well as a desktop client, this software is fairly comprehensive, has a large community and is now raising the bar with a new Business Intelligence module. Another OSS effort that has been around for a long time is Compiere. I’m listing a few other links below to other such noteworthy solutions:-

1. OpenBravo- http://www.openbravo.com/
2. OpenTaps (ERP and CRM)- http://www.opentaps.org/
3. Apache OFBiz- http://ofbiz.apache.org/
4. SugarCRM- http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/
5. Neogia- http://www.neogia.org/Welcome
6. XTuple (PostBooks)- http://www.openmfg.com/postbooks

So the next time you need a business application, try out some of the above and you might be pleasantly surprised. Besides the price is right :-)

Cisco's new Application eXtension Platform turns several models of Cisco switches into Linux application servers. With libraries in C, Java and Perl, developers will be able to use a downloadable SDK to build their apps. Check http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9701/index.html for details.

While I don’t see companies rushing to buy Cisco switches in lieu of a blade server, there could be interesting applications for extending the existing investment that customers have made in Cisco switches by making them run some applications. For example Branch application scenarios could benefit by this move. Wow ! The network is becoming the computer.

When I first previewed gOS (an Ubuntu based Linux distribution), it was a refreshing change from traditional Desktop Operating Systems. For one, I really liked its clean user interface and more importantly, gOS was the first operating system to blur the Desktop-Web divide. gOS was natively integrated with Google (see picture), so right in the center of the desktop, you had a search box. Similarly a user can launch her favorite Google applications such as Gmail, Gtalk plus other Web 2.0 apps such as Facebook right within the OS launch bar. Yesterday, I noticed that the new version integrates with MySpace as well. This is the kind of Web-Desktop integration that is supposedly to make a debut in Windows 7 (the next Desktop OS from Microsoft). gOS is really raising the bar with some solid innovation and in many ways 2008 promises to be the year when Linux will make its presence felt as a desktop operating system.

Cataracts affect millions of people around the world and so far the only hope has been surgery. While modern laser surgery does make it a simple procedure, even that might well become a thing of the past. Rajiv Bhushan, an electrical engineer set out to find a non-invasive way to correct this problem when he learnt that his father had also contracted this ailment. Six years later, the eyedrops called C-KAD are entering final stages of clinical testing and should be commercially available in the next couple of years. Truly a brilliant bio-chemical technology feat that will help millions the world over have clear vision. Read more at: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-04/no-more-blind-spots