Going Geeky ... and Going Google!

This post is a little different from all others. I just made a few slides showcasing some of the work that I’ve done in the past, and felt it would be a nice idea to share with all the readers. The deck was created in Google docs; this was the first time I tried out Google Docs for creating a presentation, and was absolutely wowed by the simplicity of it. Adding content, changing the slide design, and best of all, adding images – just drag images from another URL into your slide and you’re good to go! Try out Google Docs if you haven’t done it yet!

As for the slide deck, I’m very much looking forward to comments, suggestions, and feedback. I’d also be glad to answer any questions you might have about the content on the slides! Just a note: I won’t be able to be *too* specific about the algorithms used. But I’ll try and answer any questions as best as possible.

The iPhone killer and other stories

The subject of this post has been mulling around in my mind for days now, if not weeks. And it took the form of random thoughts flitting in and out of the mind, discussions with colleagues and friends, and finally, I got to penning them down. Now, I must say much has been written about this topic, so my thoughts are but a drop in the ocean. But nonetheless, here goes!
A top exec in the mobile phones division of a consumer electronics giant was apparently given six months by his boss 'to come up with a phone that equals the iPhone'. Now, these are not the exact words, but the meaning was pretty much the same. The immediate thought that came to mind when I heard about this was that if you're going to target something that just equals the iPhone, then you've already lost the battle even before it's begun! You've lost it even before you've gotten your device to the market! Because, if it only equals the iPhone, that doesn't give the consumer any reason to switch. (Well, unless you're in the US, you might want to switch if this device is introduced on something other than AT&T. See this and this.) That, of course, was a knee-jerk reaction, if you will. Because, if that's the first thought to cross my mind, obviously it would've crossed the mind of the exec (and his boss) who are in charge of actually doing it (unlike yours' truly, who's indulging in armchair thoughtfulness).
So we'll just leave it at that (for now). But later while I thought about it, I found that the question to be asked is really, 'What makes the iPhone the device it is right now?' Apple was never in the mobile phone market. But with a single iPhone (well, the revisions of iPhone, the iPhone 3G and now the iPhone 3GS over the years, to be precise) it not only entered the market, but captured the imagination of the public in such a way that would definitely have led to Nokia put their thinking caps on. The iPhone is a combination of great hardware (the huge screen, the capacitive touch interface), fine software (the iPhone OS), and great user interface (the multi-touch gestures). But is that the reason it's a winner? The recently launched Palm Pre, while definitely not even in the same ballpark with regard to popularity, does have a great OS (Palm's Web OS), which may even be better than the iPhone OS. The Android as a platform, while not a serious competition (yet), is definitely interesting enough for some major handset makers to be a part of the Open Handset Alliance (OHA). In fact, it is technically better, not in the least because it allows apps to run in the background, unleashing the potential of (especially) location-based services. Nokia is renowned for great hardware - rugged, reliable and very user-friendly. Blackberry is the go-to phone for business users. So you see, the iPhone, while a nice device, is not extra-ordinary compared to it's peers. So what sets it apart? Well, most of you have the answer by now - the Apple app store. By opening up the iPhone 3G SDK to the developer community, Apple hit the jackpot early on in the game. And now, it's an uphill game for any new player in the market. I don't know if it was Jobs' idea to do it, but whoever it was, has to be a genius. Release the iPhone SDK to the thousands - if not tens of thousands - of developers out there, and it's like having a thousand brilliant minds working for you, and your product. No one, not even Apple - or Microsoft, or Google, or Intel for that matter - can compete with the power of the bright and crazy minds lurking out there! The app store is, in fact, the propeller of the iPhone sales! So it's a win-win situation for Apple - not only does it push the iPhone sales, it also fills in its cash registers via the 30 percent cut that it takes from the app sales. One only has to see the apps available for other mobile phones to see the wide chasm that separates the iPhone and all other smart-phones/feature-phones - Windows Mobile, Nokia, Android, you name it. While Android does have the Android Marketplace, it's nowhere close to the App store - both in terms of the variety of apps and the volume of downloads. After the success of the app store, the others are rushing in to create their own app store, but again, that is playing catch-up. And then they're not doing a good job of it!
Coming back to the point of the consumer phone giant exec who's been given the brief of launching an iPhone-equaling phone (they're not even calling it the iPhone-killer), I wondered if the guys have got it right? Does a better hardware and/or software mean a better phone (in terms of sales numbers)? And will this consumer giant be open to the idea of an 'open' development environment? Will it open it's SDK to the developer community? And what will be the ingredients for this iPhone-killer? Apple revolutionized the smart-phone market by thinking differently, not by playing catch-up to Nokia (which is still, and will be for years to come, the undisputed leader in the mobile-phone space). And having come up with a device that gives a great new user-experience, it went one up and came out with the app store. In a different context, some one at Twitter apparently asked, "Can we do to Google what Google did to others?" I think that that's one hell of a question to ask. Can some one do to Apple what Apple did to the (rest of) the mobile phone market? I don't know if some one can, but I sure do wish that some one does. Finally, a competitive market is the surest hotbed of innovation. Apple has rushed ahead of the pack, and it is surely difficult to revolutionize the market with a 'iPhone-killer'.
What I'll try and do next is relate some of my own experiences as a researcher. I cannot of course disclose what our team is working on, but I'll try and make the point. Our team is working on coming up with cutting edge algorithms to build a product in the mobile phone/multi-media space. In the early stages, when we were doing a literature survey of the state-of-the-art in the field, we found ourselves looking for lacunae in the existing technology. Well, sure enough that is one way to go about it. But I later realized, that that approach would only result in incremental benefits. Instead, why not look at the problem and think of a completely different approach? By a 'completely different approach' I mean look at it from the point of view of - What would I want in this if I were using this technology/product? Of course, as a researcher, you have to answer two questions - first, what do you want to do, and second, how do you go about doing it? The first deals with ideas, and the second with execution. (Here is another excellent post about ideas vs. execution. And another one.) To paraphrase the words in the first post - the most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000. So well, both are, of course, important. But I think that the first step in the process is the idea. What would I want in this technology, as a user? What would make me choose technology X over Y? And I found myself asking the same question in my own quest to come up with a solution for the problem we're working on. As long as you're looking at your competitor and asking, "What can I give my user that s/he can't?", you'll always (unwittingly, may be) be playing catch-up. Instead, the question that begs asking is, "What would my user like in this product/technology?" Of course, having answered that question, the real-challenge is to actually give it to the user! But I guess that the engineers/researchers/technologists are capable enough of doing that. The problem is not about answering the question, it is about the right question to be asked. Apple did that by revolutionizing the way people think about mobile phones. It did that by coming up with the idea of giving the user a computing device that accesses the Web on the go, and which, as a bonus, is able to receive/make calls, and send text messages! It figured out the execution of that plan (it has patents in resizing web pages for a mobile device), and bingo! A great idea and great execution, and you have a (literally) $20 million business. It did that by thinking about giving the user the power to select what sort of features s/he would want on their device. And it did that by launching the app store as a marketplace for applications that the user can download to their iPhones. Most recently (with the launch of the iPhone 3GS), it did that by giving the user the power to share multimedia content (video) directly from their mobile phone. Heck, the idea and the execution. Sounds utterly simple when you get it right, doesn't it?

Kal, aaj aur Kal

The idea for this post started out from a discussion with our VP today at work. Our team was presenting stuff we've worked on in the current quarter. At the end of the discussion, our VP asked a question, "How do you know if this stuff is going to be relevant three years from now?" What he meant was that given the current technology, of course what we were working on was useful, that it would add value for the consumer. But, what we're working on today might be rendered irrelevant by the rapid strides in technology! And he had a point. Today, the mobile phone is morphing into a computing platform. It's a device that enables a convergence in technology probably few would have visualized even five years ago. It's a device that's with you, whether you're working, or playing or socializing. You can use it to check e-mails on the go (even though it's still a nascent technology), click snaps on your lunch meeting, or capture a nifty video at your friend's wedding. Not only can you do all this, you can share what you're doing with your friends!! 

If we project this tremendous growth in the future, it's easy to see where our VP's question came from. And more importantly, what it points to. Today, it is no longer enough to innovate and come up with a bright idea. It's as important to make sure that people would still want that idea when it actually appears in a product! As technologists, it is no longer enough to be at the cutting edge today, it is imperative to be able to visualize what tomorrow's cutting edge technology would be. Else the millions of rupees that are spent in the R&D budgets would amount to nothing, apart from a smart prototype. Of course, this - visualizing the future - is not easy. Not everyone can be a visionary like Steve Jobs, and come up with the concept of an iPhone - and do it all over again with the iPhone 3G.  I read this post on Techcrunch a couple of weeks back, and that came to mind when I was thinking about this. Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn CEO) appearing on Charlie Rose commented that 'every individual is now an entrepreneur'. And it's true if you think about it in this context. You're an entrepreneur because you have to think about the technology trends, be in touch with the market directions. Of course, you could just forget about all that and just bury your head in the gory stuff - the equations, and the code and all that. But if you think about the relevance of your labors, well, you have to think about all of the above! 

Now this post would have probably concluded here, had it not been for a discussion with a friend, which I was lucky to have. While talking about an earlier post, and my discussion today, we realized that this issue of relevance is not just limited to technology practitioners. It is, in some sense, far more relevant to the technology practitioners of tomorrow! The engineering graduates of today. Yes, they face a much, much stiffer challenge to keep abreast of the latest technology. By the time they graduate, much of the stuff they learned in their junior years would already be outdated! Of course, the fundamental concepts stay the same. But their application is advancing by leaps and bounds. Is our system geared to handle this challenge? Obviously, this goes beyond the classrooms, and the labs. It goes into all those TechFests, and competitions and all the fun things that you do outside the classroom! But of course, the seeds of it have to be sown in our universities. And there lies the challenge. To the educators, as well as the students. Can they take up the gauntlet and make sure that what the universities produce is not just an 'assembly line' of engineering graduates, but guys who can actually innovate and think about tomorrow? This is especially true in a country like India, which severly needs innovators and innovation, if it is to retain the competitive advantage.  

'Tweet'ing News!

After following all the Twitter-related stuff on Techcrunch, I finally took the plunge and signed up for the hugely popular microblogging service. Actually, to call it a 'service' would be a bit wrong! For it's not a service that you'd use, it's actually your life in small, byte-sized chunks! Be it sharing what you're doing right now - dining out at that Italian restaurant, or watching Slumdog bag eight Oscars - or sharing your opinions on the latest music, or just 'tweeting' about nothing in particular, people use Twitter to broadcast to anyone who'd care to follow what's going on in their lives at any given instant of time. I used to wonder why would anyone be interested in what I'm eating, or doing, or watching, but having used the service for just a day or two, I'm hooked! Yes, the service is very addictive, and questions like 'who'd be interested' can only cross the mind of someone who's not 'been-there-done-that' so to say. Within the first few hours of using Twitter, I found myself using the service as a virtual diary of sorts. Yes, a diary to record snippets of your day, week in small chunks. The best part is that I can do it unobtrusively, and the 140-character limitation actually is a blessing in disguise. Often when I sit down to write a post, the so-called 'Writer's Block' takes over, and I don't know what to write and how to write. There're so many thoughts swirling through the mind. No such thing with Twitter. Just a few words, and you're done! Well, I'll stop rambling on about Twitter and what I feel about it. Be sure to check out the site if you haven't yet done so. For those who're active 'Twitter'ers, feel free to write on what you feel about the site in the comments. 

The Browser is your canvas

After this post about my switching loyalties to Chrome, now for some serious stuff. Irrespective of which browser you use for your online activities, one thing looks pretty certain, going by the sign of the times. The browser is going to rule our online lives for a long time to come. The hype about Windows 7 (and OSX and the gazillion of Linux distros out there) not withstanding, it looks like the next wars will be about browsers. Microsoft's Internet Explorer though still the most widely used browser (seriously, does anyone use IE?!), is losing market share consistently, and while Chrome is yet to make a sizeable dent in the browser market, it is catching up - and fast. The browser is quickly becoming synomous with just about anything we do with our desktop or notebook. Besides the usual e-mail and web-surfing, an increasing number of apps and services are moving from a desktop-based mode to a web-top based mode. Google mail introduced integrated chat a long time ago, and Yahoo followed suit. So you no longer need to have a separate chat client to IM with your friends and colleagues. Moving on to document creation as well, Google docs allows you to create documents online, using your browser. You can also share the documents you create with your friends online. As cloud-computing gains ground, we have ever-increasing data, residing not on our desktops, but 'in the cloud', free to be accessed from any place that has a WiFi connection. Some of these services - like the Windows Live Mesh - do require you to install a dedicated software, but others just let you access them through your browser. Just open your browser, and you're good to go! 

Some of the recently - well, not that recently - announced services take this one level further. Now I do not even have to use Adobe Reader to view my pdf files on my desktop. Google mail now supports this feature from right within Gmail. There are quite a few document sharing services - like Scribd, and Docstoc - which allow you to upload pdf (and other filetypes, of course) documents and then view them right in your browser window. You can also create, view and share presentations online, right from the (safe?) confines of your browser - thanks to Google presentations and Slideshare. Coming to multimedia, Flickr, Google Photos are long the de-facto standard in photo viewing and sharing. A site called resizeImage.org even offers basic online photo-editing tools like image resizing and cropping. So you no longer have to download that college re-union photo to crop that pretty face from it! Another very recent launched service allows you to 

create, edit, and save Microsoft Office Documents on the server - without downloading the file or any plugins. -- source: TechCrunch. 

With Flash becoming ubiquitous, and media streaming getting bigger and bigger with sites like YouTube, Hulu, Joost, we are now watching more videos online - again, in our browser - rather than on our desktop. YouTube is already serving 100 million videos every day, and this number will only grow bigger. 

So where does all this lead to? Will we see the browser becoming the next OS - in a manner of speaking? Will everything that we do on our desktops or notebooks be in a browser window? Techcrunch is already building a Tablet prototype, where the browser takes centerstage. The signs are definitely there. Win the browser market and win the world, anyone? 

School 2.0

I've just started School 2.0. Its' been a few years since School 1.0 was complete, after four years of undergrad studies and another two years at the Electrical Engineering Department at IIT Bombay. And no matter how hard you might have mugged up all the texts for that Numerical Methods course in your grad studies, you do get rusty if you haven't been in touch for a while. And so I decided to use some of the spare time at work to go back to School. Well, the spare time is courtesy the end-of-year project closure formalities, which means that we do not have much concrete work to do right now. I felt this would be a good opportunity to get back in touch with the basics. So I'm currently studying applied probability theory and stochastic processes. And helping me out with it is the excellent course material from the Masachussets Institute of Technology! MIT has an excellent initiative called the Open Courseware (OCW), where lecture notes, assignments and exams and solutions are uploaded for the courses offered in MIT. The material is real good, and I would encourage everyone who hasn't already checked out their site to do so. 

The box said 'Requires Win 95, NT or better'. So I installed Linux

Yes, it is true... I've just switched loyalties to Linux! I'm now using the Ubuntu 7.10 64 bit edition, and from my initial experiences, I'm just loving it! Especially, the graphics part, which IMHO (in my humble opinion ;)) is way beyond what Windows Vista has to offer. The nVidia GeForce 6150 Graphics card which was lying unutilized all this while (yep, I'm not a great gaming enthusiast), suddenly sprang to life and the snazzy effects are cool, to say the least. Well, there were teething troubles in getting up my notebook to full functionality, so to speak. But they were just that - teething troubles. And thanks to the huge Ubuntu community out there, getting them sorted out was no sweat. That's the best part about using Linux. There's a whole bunch of guys out there, who've likely faced the same problem that you're facing right now, and you'll find the answer on a forum. You just have to google on your problem, and Voila! And oh, the ubuntu official forums are there, too. So getting my Wireless connection up and running, and fixing the sound issue (no sound) was done in a matter of an hour or two (well, the sound card issue was vexed).
The move from Windows was prompted by an itch, really. An itch to do something different, to just experience a different OS for a while (OK, OK, I'm a geek ;)). And at not having to pay through your nose for softwares, and updates - who doesn't like free stuff?! And real quality free stuff!! The installation itself was pretty easy. I've worked on Linux boxes quite extensively during my grad student days at IIT, Bombay, and so Linux installations were nothing new. In fact, Linux itself was nothing new. And there was a time when I was more comfortable at command lines than Windows-based apps (for one, it really helps on a notebook, when you don't use a mouse). But installing Ubuntu from the disc proved nothing at all like installing that Linux distro I'd installed on my machine during my IIT days. No manual partitioning, no setting up /boot, /home, /swap; no being prompted for LILO or Grub. Just a glide through the set-up process where you're asked for the place settings and a couple of administrative things. The whole set-up was done within half an hour, and I was ready to go! Next followed setting up the Internet connection (the LAN card was configured correctly, so this was smooth), and getting help on setting up the Wireless connection. And fixing the sound issue. This far the UI,while being on par with Windows, was pretty ordinary after all. Then I installed the restricted firmware for the nVidia Graphics card, and boy! The snazzy effects while switching between apps, opening or closing a terminal, switching workspaces... A whole lot of cool stuff! Then downloaded the security updates from the Ubuntu site, and there I was ready to go.
I've been using Ubuntu for the last couple of days, and the experience has been perfect. In fact, it does all the things Windows does, and more! So unlike the Linux distro that I'd used in IIT-B, I don't have to mount and unmount the CD-ROM and USB drives - they're done by the system. Even though I'm comfortable with that part, that was a pleasant surprise (yep, I hadn't quite been in touch with the evolution of Linux the last couple of years). At the same time, the command line just puts a lot of power at your fingertips (literally and figuratively). I don't think I'd be moving back to Windows any time soon. So here's to Linux!
Cheers!!

Dont Look, We're changing! Bet you can't NOT look!!

Amidst a lot of hype and buzz, the Android phone was finally launched in the US on September 23. I guess it'll be quite a while before it comes around to Indian markets, but looking at the features it really made me wish I could lay my hands on one. Here is the coverage on Techcrunch, and you can read another post here. Now you'd think that these 'smart phones' are only for the nerd and geeks amongst us, but if you scratch the surface, it's kind of a revolution that's happening in the mobile space. It began with the iPhone launch in July, and it's really catching up with the Android launch. Mobile phones are no longer just devices that you use to make calls, or text messages to your friends or girlfriend. They are packing in a whole lot of features - right from checking your e-mails to searching maps to cool apps that allow you to do a whole lot of stuff that seemed just un-imaginable just an year ago! You can use your mobile phone to listen to your favourite songs, to chat with your friends, to browse the web, to check your e-mail (and make sure that it syncs up with the mail server!)... And the list goes on... Heck, you can even take snaps, record a video inpromptu, and watch full-length movies on that small device! And you can carry all this functionality in your pocket! And with at least 8GB of storage, you don't have to offload data every other day to your notebook. I seriously can't think of something that my notebook can do that these phones cannot! Now a lot of phones had these kind of features for a while now. They were restricted to the cool dudes with hot pockets. Or the business executive who'd use them as a PDA. But with these phones being launched in the USD 200 range, they've become a lot more you-and-me-friendly, from the cost point of view. The fact that the iPhone 2G sold as many phones in the first week as the first iPhone sold in a month says something! The Android phone may not (yet) give the iPhone serious competition, but it's sure to revolutionize the segment, and give Steve Jobs something to think about. The mobile phones are changing in yet another aspect. They started out as big, bulky devices, and then moved to a phase where small was in. Now it seems that the catch-phrase is Big is Beautiful and life for the mobile phone seems to have come full-circle! But then looking at everything that's packed in there... Well, I can't wait to get either the iPhone or the Android for myself. But I guess I'll have to wait... At INR 31K, the iPhone in India is still a bit out of my range. And the Android G1 will take a while to come to our shores... Till then, you can drool over some of these images ;)

T for technology, T for terror

Came across this post on TechCrunch about GnuPG, a software that helps you to encrypt mails, to avoid a hacker looking into your private mails. The post is a little bit geekish, but contains nice step-by-step instructions to use both GnuPG and FireGPG, a Firefox extension which provides a nicer interface than the command line one given by GPG. I haven't tried it (well, I don't have any incriminating mails to hide, for one. For another, I'm not running for a public post, to have some enthusiastic hacker look into my mailbox ;) ), but it looks pretty useful tool to have. But call it the effect of the current security situation, call it paranoia, the thought occured to me that this could easily be (mis-)used by terrorists or anyone with nefarious motives to communicate securely, without having the intelligence agencies eavesdropping. Already the bad guys seem to be one step ahead of the good guys, and in these times of cyber-crime, cyber-fraud and cyber-terrorism, this is a real serious prospect. The Internet has shrunk the world, and while it certainly helps me to chat with my friend in the US, it also helps the bad guys to co-ordinate their plans for that bombing in Cairo, sitting in Alaska (OK, no reference to Palin here ;) )! As terrorists and criminals become increasingly hi-tech and get more educated, highly qualified people into their fold, it's becoming a case of playing catch-up with them. Now I'm not saying that the bad guys are not already using encryption and this site will have some one saying 'Eureka!'. But the point I'm trying to make is that there's such a wealth of information available online that can easily be mis-used. Like Naseeruddin Shah's character says in Wednesday, "Internet pe 'bomb' ke liye search karo toh 352 sites milengi!" Yes, sad but true. We talk about technology enabling our lives. But it is also being used in the pursuit of much more dastardly acts, acts that are claiming more and more lives - across the world...

A Journey to the Beginnning of the Universe?

So the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have begun with the first proton beams completing a full circuit of the particle accelerator. It is being touted as the Next Big Thing in the world of particle physics; with the data collected from the experiment being used to test out the math worked out by the theoretical physicists. Amid all the hype and hoopla surrounding it, there were also fears that the experiment would lead to the world being wiped out, but those were nothing more than a few Chicken Littles' running around saying, "The Sky is falling!". Here are a few links on the various aspects of the experiment - hope you find them interesting! 

• http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080905/full/news.2008.1085.html - some interesting numbers on the experiment.
  
• http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/11/72198?currentPage=all - a series from Wired.com. 
  
• http://blogs.uslhc.us/?p=328 - a blog by a US team involved in the LHC experiment.
• http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=c51JNQ1nH_o - the moment of the first circulating beam. 
  

Update: just came across this interesting video: 

Google Chrome... Rock ON!!

OK, so this one is for nerds. Or is it?! I'm referring to the launch of Google's new browser Chrome. One would think that a post on a beta launch of a browser would be strictly for nerds, but look at the publicity it generated! I don't remember the last time a browser launch received so much widespread coverage!! The internet of course led the pack with reviews of the new browser as soon as Google launched it on September 2. But articles in the leading newspapers, and even the tabloids!! Here is the article in Mumbai Mirror. And the Pune edition (Pune Mirror) also ran an article reviewing it, where they asked a serious techie to review the browser for its readers! All this within 24 hours of its launch! Well, so I guess this is no longer for nerds or techies exclusively. I guess I'm not really a nerd, but then your's truly was also waiting impatiently for the launch of this browser - in fact stayed awake late in the night waiting for the launch at 11:00 AM PDT! And I've been using it ever since, and to quote the Mac tagline, 'I'm loving it!'. Yes, the browser has a clean UI, and is almost minimalistic on the UI front. But boy, is it fast! Don't know how exactly browser speed is evaluated, but I tried loading a few rich content pages into Chrome and Firefox 3.0.1 and the new Internet Explorer 8 (which also launched less than a week back - aren't the browser wars hotting up!?). Just to be sure that the pages were not cached, I cleared the browser cache in all the cases. And Chrome trumped the other two hands-down! Another cool feature of the browser is the "Omnibox" as Google engineers call it. There is a single bar that serves as the address bar and the search box. Also the auto-suggest entries are displayed in a list in the same box. Google claims that the browser's main feature, or USP, is it's rock-solid stability. This is the first multi-process browser, in that each tab runs as a separate process. So if one tab hangs, then you don't have to close the entire browser, just the particular process can be killed. Oh, that reminds me, the browser has it's own process manager! Oh well, I could go on and on about it. Instead, let me just direct you to the experts - Chrome's official web-site. For those of you interested in knowing a little bit of engineering that goes behind Chrome, you can find it here, in this comic strip. I've been using Firefox for a long while now, but I guess I'd be compelled to switch to Chrome. Chrome simply rocks!! And oh, it is open-source. I can't wait for the next release, and for plug-ins for Chrome. 

Google Chrome.... Rock ON!! 

Update: Here is a look at the market share of Chrome, a week after launch. For those interested for a review of Chrome, you can find a good one here.