10 Years of .Net – Is Java losing the battle? »

Here is an interesting article from The Register, about 10 Years of .Net. While the article does reflect on .Net’s journey in the last 10 years, what made me wonder is really about Java. Java was touted to the developer community for its, “write once, run anywhere”. But if you now look at Java’s usage, it is used more on the enterprise applications (J2EE) and to some extent on mobile devices. While it makes some sense for mobile applications, I don’t understand why one would need platform independence on the server side. While the language itself is easy to learn and write, you will see plethora of web application frameworks, based on all kinds of patterns. While choice is good, you will soon realize that too many choices waste significant amount of time, evaluating the right one, for your project. Even though proprietary, getting into .Net based applications is not that difficult,when compared to Seam.

While applets are no more exciting, why is Oracle-Sun not working on competing with Silverlight or AIR? If Microsoft saw the potential in Java’s ease and made C#, Sun should also have tried something in this space. Steve Jobs have always not shown much interest using Flash. This is a great opportunity for Sun to leverage its developer base and come out with something slick.

Apple Sues HTC For Infringing On iPhone Patents »

According to this article at Gizmodo, Apple is suing HTC for infringing on some 20 patents related to user interface. Earlier, Nokia was also accused of the same thing. Here is what Steve Jobs had to say on the lawsuit:

“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”

The World is NOT flat! »

Contrary to what Mr. Nilekani and Mr. Friedman would like you to believe, world is NOT really flat. I am from India and I know for sure that in India, we still don’t have all the cool techie stuff that the US and other western countries enjoy. While Sweden and Norway are talking about 4G, we still don’t have 3G here in India. We don’t have Vonage or something as popular. We even don’t have Number Portability. Can you believe that while Toyota Corolla costs around $15000 in the USA, it costs approximately $27,000 in Bangalore? I know the import duties and all othe reasons, but at the end, it IS lot more expensive in India. Apple does sell iPhone and iPods here, but we don’t have a iTunes Store. While my business partner in the US, Joe, is watching football games on thescoutingedge.com, the player just says, “Buffering” for us.

If you are wondering why I am so upset about all this, innovation in developing countries will always be slow because we don’t experience technology as you do. For example, if we cannot experience video conferencing on cell phones, it is difficult for us to dream about building a better streaming algorithm for mobile phones. I know this sounds very frustrating, but again, we don’t have enough water, food and electricity, why am I complaining about not having cool gadgets??

Microsoft’s hardwork in 2009 »

Mashable has an interesting article on Microsoft’s products in 2009 and how it corrected its course (with encarta, flight simulator etc). We saw some big products like Bing and Windows 7 in this year. Read more about it here.

10 painful Netbook and Laptop positions »

Gizmodo has an article showing ten positions of exquisite pain. I am sure we would have tried most of those positions.

We need lights that melt snow! »

Engadget has an article about how cold states in the US are complaining about LED lights not generating enough heat to melt the snow that covers them. I guess, incandescent light bulbs, despite being energy inefficient, had their own advantages. You can read more about the article here.

Vertical Search Engines »

With number of websites, blogs and microblogging sites increasing, how effective are broad search engines like Google and Bing? Even with great page ranking algorithms, over time, I believe search results will become diluted. For example, if you type, “Hospitals in Bangalore”, you will probably see results from Google Local first, followed by Google web search results. In fact, you will see almost all the results duplicated. In order for me to get more effective results like hospitals by their speciality or even by reputation, I will probably have to give more keywords to Google. Now let us move to the mobile world, where typing is a pain in the bottom. What I foresee is that more and more vertical search engines will come up in the future, focussing on a particular domain and region. Searching at WebMD will most likely give better search results about a particular medical problem than doing a similar thing on typical search engines.

Another challenge to search engines are “content farms”. You can read more about content farms here. Here is an interesting article on the impact of content farms to search engines.