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Microsoft WebMatrix – a free web development environment »

As from the Microsoft website:WebMatrix is everything you need to build Web sites using Windows. It includes IIS Developer Express (a development Web server), ASP.NET (a Web framework), and SQL Server Compact (an embedded database). It streamlines Web site development and makes it easy to start Web sites from popular open-source apps. The skills and code you develop with WebMatrix transition seamlessly to Visual Studio and SQL Server.

Just like XAMPP, WebMatrix provides you a complete web development environment on Windows, that supports both ASP.Net and PHP. WebMatrix supports a new scripting syntax, called Razor for ASP.Net web pages. It also has a built-in SEO report to make the site more visible to search engines. With built-in support for FTP, publishing the site to production environment is also easy.

Online Book Rental, the P2P Way »

Online book rental is now becoming popular on the internet. We recently had the opportunity to work on Silibi whose business model is focussed on peer-to-peer rental. For us, the concept of exchanging books over the internet, using the APIs from ISBNDB, Amazon, USPS and Paypal was very interesting.
We initially used ISBNDB to access the books database and it worked great for us. However, we needed the book image and its weight, so we switched over to Amazon. USPS is seamlessly integrated with the check-out process and shipment labels automatically get generated.  Check it out yourself at Silibi and you will see that the application is very fast, even when it tries to retrieve lot of information from many 3rd party sources.

Video resumes in India »

In the last 3-4 decades, if there is one thing that has not been significantly influenced by technology, it must be resumes. Of course, they have moved from paper based to electronic format, but the content, format etc are pretty much the same. Except for few tech-savvy companies, HR personnel have not yet started experiencing the power of Video resumes.

With internet connection speeds pretty decent nowadays, video resumes are not that painful to download and view. In fact, with advances in the video encoding and streaming technologies, viewing videos online is now a seamless experience. One cannot deny the fact that video resumes offer more insight into the candidates. I have heard ridiculous comments like “Candidates are all staged” in video resumes. Well…so are paper based resumes. In paper based resumes, candidates try to use more prominent keywords, so that job portals can pull them up over other resumes. So, more than the resume content, keywords play a more important role in paper based resumes. In video based resumes, HR personnel get to SEE and HEAR the candidates, without even picking up the phone.

Communication skills are as important  as technical skills: How many times have you worked with an employee with whom communication is very difficult. I know of many employees who are afraid to pick up the telephone to speak to US clients. Interaction within a group improves the overall efficiency of the team.

There are two types of video resumes, where candidates speak about themselves for few minutes. The second one, which is more of an evolution of the first, allows employers to post jobs and set relevant questions to those job profiles. Candidates can answer the questions, at their own convenience. The advantage in the second one is that the candidates are answering to questions that are more relevant . iVirtual (in India) and VIP (in USA) are one of those service providers, who allow employers to post questions and review them later on the web, at their own convenience.

Web Development without Flash »

Our clients loved flash; they wanted those cool animations on the site. But the problem was that the flash development was not so easy to get into. Most graphics people we got were good at Photoshop and could do basic tweens in Flash. ActionScript was pretty complicated for them. For a non-flash developer, Flash was not that intuitive. Even simple things like accessing a database was quite complicated, like using intermediate XML files etc. Overall, Flash was a pain in the back. Luckily, JavaScript evolved over time. Using jQuery, we can do many cool transitions and animations, without using a separate plugin like Flash. I had problems with Flash on my 64 bit Vista.

We now hear that Apple is not supporting Flash on its iPod, iPhone and iPad. You can read Steve Job’s letter here.

Websites, without plugins are always welcome!

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??