The Yaxis Live by Rajesh Kumar

Every Tom and Jane in the business of IT talks about the cloud strategy these days. Some see it as panacea to managing a server room or a data center, others think it helps them reduce their dependence on irksome IT staff, yet others think Cloud is fashionable, and there’s need to adopt it, without thinking much about it.

I think many CIOs take this decision without a serious evaluation. The resultant consequence – often ill-thought out adoptions that do not bring in the right efficiencies.

It is a fact that there is no copybook definition of cloud computing.However, there’s clearly an infrastructure stack, and an application stack. Often, this application stack gets referred to as ‘service’ or by another much abused term ’SAAS’! Quite simply, the application uses the computing power of anonymous machines sitting in some invisible data center managed by someone else. Amazon is a typical example of this.

Coming to the applications now. Adopting organizations often get swayed by terms such as multi-tenancy of applications. Frankly, multi-tenancy comes at its own price. A multi-tenant application, mostly, cannot be tailor made to your requirements. Take it or leave it.  Think about your apartment in a skyscraper. You cannot go grossly out of line with the rest of the building. You can maybe, change the colour of the walls if you like.  It is standardized customization, if you so like.

That of course does not mean business processes cannot be in cloud. Business Process applications are rapidly maturing too. Force.com is an example of organizations that are moving forward in a rapid fashion. Zoho is yet another example.

That begs the question – should I, or, shouldn’t I. My suggestion is as follows:

- Have your own reasons for moving to cloud.

- Don’t think everyone on the cloud is on cloud nine.

- Have your own starting point.

- IT problems will remain, even after you move to the cloud – only the nature will change.

Take YOUR call!

Let me admit this – I never heard of Pranav Mistry before. However, the simplicity with which he presented his Sixth Sense technology at TEDIndia recently is an absolute stunner. Someone forwarded me this link and I watched this several times already. There are many people with several disruptive ideas and innovations, however, demonstrating their relevance to everyday touch-points is something to be truly seen and felt via this presentation. Due to Youtube duration limitations, the presentation is in two parts. Total duration is less than 15 minutes and you must watch this, even if you know nothing about technology.

The technology is called Sixth Sense, and in Pranav’s words, connects the real to the digital. It has some pretty amazing applications already.

Pranav, your presentation has left a promise.We wait for it to be fulfilled soon. And by the way, you rock!

Long back, I remember calling one of my friends around dinner time. I did remember he was out of town but wasn’t sure where he told me was going. Those were early days of the mobile phone so I thought what the heck. His number rang for a slightly longish period and then he growled – I am in Sydney and it is 1 AM. What’s it that I wanted? (Later authorities in India mandated that when in international roaming, the caller should be notified).

At workplace many times, not knowing where a colleague is. More so in a multi-time-zone company. A Google Latitude like application, implemented within a corporation could be a great help. Tracking a sales team could be quite a nightmare ( When I say tracking, I don’t mean snooping on their planned vs actual travel, but merely knowing the time-zone for a call appropriateness. It is another matter that many organizations would like to see their guys on a screen just for that, usually fruitlessly).

Google already has this technology where your location can be shared with friends automatically depending on mobile phone connection. Large organizations buy big number phone connection from one or two vendors.

Maybe the blocks of technology of what I am proposing is already there. Imagine, on your personalized screen in the intranet/extranet, you cannot just look up a person’s contact details, but his current location. You would be wise enough to call a Tampa based colleague an hour beyond his normal time, when you know he/she is in Chicago on business.

Can I expect a reply to an urgent mail? I think that would be cool.

On the flip side, I do agree there are privacy issues. But then technology has to be used meaningfully deployed.. If an organization wants to snoop on the location of its employees, they can always do through other means. This is a cultural dimension and not a technology dimension. Imagine a positive deployment and its potential.

I find it amazing that the platform that really taught everyone how to blog is stagnant so badly. I am not disappointed just like that, I just felt so after spending 2 hours trying to get even a basic theme to work. Failed and given up!

1. Good themes are in terribly short supply
2. Customizing a theme is quite painful.
3. Try submitting to Google Webmasters. In the face of inexplicable xml errors, you would not know how to do your site verification.
4. Circular loop error with Feedburner. If you redirect your feed to feedburner, you obviously cannot use the redirected feed to ping or to submit as a sitemap.

Frankly, when I was setting this up, it looked so archaic that I gave up. Not sure what the product management team of Blogger been upto. Good morning to you.

As I write this, I wonder whether I should call this as outcome or observations – it surely wouldn’t meet my wife’s scientific observation standards (But then which husband or his work has met his wife’s standards anyway?!).

I mentally had the list of Google services I was using, but when I make a list, I find it has a long tail.

1. Google Search: Very often, several times a day.
2. Gmail: At least two times a day, more on weekends.
3. GApps Mail: Same as Gmail
4. Google Calendar: That reminds me when to pay the school fee and wish non Facebook contacts birthdays, though I am still very bad at it. See the mail alert daily. It comes in the morning.
5. Blogger: Ocassionally photoblog.
6. Google Reader: Is usually open, esp on weekends.
7. Google News: Several times a day.
8. Picasa:Multiple times a week. I love playing with my camera.
9. Feedburner: For those who follow this blog via feeds, the rendering is by Feedburner, which is now part of the great G.
10. Webmaster tools: Ocassionally I do login to check for any indexing issues on my blog.
11. Adsense: Never made any real money but runs on my blogs nevertheless.
12. Google Maps: I find myself using it on my phone few times a month(mostly to boast about my phone!)
13. Google Earth: When someone invites me to a new part of town, I surely look it up.
14. Chrome: Tried and hated. Uninstalled.
15. And how do I forget this – YouTube – we love tuning into Bollywood movie songs here. Couple of times a month.

Cellphones are unarguably wireless devices, and therefore work on waves to route communication but the below video showing showing cellphones working as kitchen microwave is too much.

See corn popping up on a flat table surrounded by four ringing mobile phones. Not sure which company makes those phones, but they sure have an unexplored line of business ready- Portable Microwave Oven or Rechargeable Pop Corn maker.

If they are just another phone handsets, well, I suddenly feel quite convinced the good old wireline phone is such  a great idea. Meanwhile, bhejafry, anyone?

GApps, earlier known as Google Apps for your domain, is a service by which you can primarily create simple webpages as well as run your own email service, using Gmail engine. Fellow blogger Nirmal has a post on ‘7 Reasons Why you Should be Using Google Apps’.

Google has both free and paid versions of this service, targeted towards Organizations, Schools, Families etc. I was pleasantly surprised that even former President Abdul Kalam is a user of GApps (Check out an MX lookup on www.abdulkalam.com). Wow, what an endorsement!

As an admin of GApps for my alumni network, I give good marks to email service. I have the following wishlist:

• Improve the Email List (aka Distribution list) management. Currently if you have to create a 200 member DL, it is quite a pain.
• Credentials Distribution: If you upload a CSV, GApps does a good job of creating the users. However, you are left with an CSV sheet where you have to mailmerge and inform the users through email. Very tedious task. Ideally, I would love to see one more column in the CSV format capturing alternate ids of all users, and then leave it to GApps to mail the new login credentials to all users automatically. In one shot.
• Blogger Integration: Wordpress currently facilitates GApps Email integration with Wordpress.com blogs hosted on domain. Not sure why Blogger does not seem to step forward on this. Top of my list.
• Common Footer message: Would love to see the feature of a common footer message that will be appended to all messages/all new messages.
• Googlepages:The website maker is extremely basic and needs very significant improvement. The limitation on the ability to HTML edit the pages completely is something that should change.

On the whole I give high marks to GApps.