Disclaimer: I am not against the Gov. policy to block websites;
But they should verify before blocking anything. Very recently BSNL blocked Fatcow and all its hosted sites. I have my blog and few other sites (including DreamStarts.in, MindCron.com and bloggersqa.com) hosted on FatCow. FatCow is the most reliable hosting with very good customer support.
Similarly other ISPs like RCom, Airtel have also blocked content/video/music sharing websites.
Here is a trick to open blocked websites:
Simply point your ISP DNS to google DNS ie. 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4
I request to all my users who are using BSNL broadband and not able to access these websites, please use this trick to bypass it. I have already filed a complaint to BSNL. If BSNL doesn't unblock my sites in 2 days I will move these websites to other hosting. Ya, it costs me a lot but I will have to do that.
More and more game companies are turning to the HTML5 web format to create cross-platform games. The latest is Pangalore, a social and mobile game startup based in Seoul.
Pangalore was founded in May to create games that can run on multiple platforms by using HTML5 as their technical foundation. Pangalore built from scratch a game engine that can work within the limits of HTML5, said Doyon Kim, chief product officer and co-founder of the company who runs the office in San Jose, Calif., in an interview.
Pangalore is announcing two new Facebook and mobile games today: Artfit and Wild West Solitaire. Both are slow-moving, cartoon-like titles that accommodate the main weakness of HTML5 now: slow speed. Pangalore is also working on two more titles, Pop the Candy and Bubble Prince, for release later. Kim says the company will release titles every couple of months.
“The benefit of HTML5 games is that you can start them on one platform and then finish them on another,” Kim said. “We designed our games from the start to be multiplatform games.”
While young, the company has a big staff. It has 25 employees and funding from NHN, the largest online game portal in Korea. The good thing about HTML5 games is they can run on just about any platform, from Facebook to Android phones and tablets. It runs on browsers on mobile devices, PCs, and Macs. Pangalore is also making native format games for the Apple iPhone.
Kim said that deeper strategy and role-playing games are in the works as well, using the Unity 3D game engine. Those games, including a simulation title, will be coming in early 2012. Among the team are some experienced game creators including those who created Ragnarok Online, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game with 3 million players in North America.
The games are free-to-play and are accessible from a single Facebook account that works across all devices. Kim co-founded the firm with Brian Kang, former chief executive of Gravity and a former venture capitalist. Kim previously founded Dialpad Communications, Opinity and Spotplex. Rivals included other HTML5 game makers such as Moblyng and Zynga.
The Wild West Solitaire game sets players on a card-playing journey along the historic Oregon Trail, where you race against the clock or friends to play solitaire challenges. Artfit is a falling blocks game where players must place the pieces into forms to score points and advance through increasingly complex levels. Over time, HTML5 is expected to show better performance so that a wider variety of games will be playable on it. Pangalore hopes to be ready when that happens.
www.wdyl.com is Google's new product based search engine that was launched quietly today. WDYL (What Do You Love?) lets you search across all the google products like 'Google Translate', 'Google Trends', 'Google Books', 'Sketchup', 'YouTube', 'Google Alerts' at one place.
As usual the user interface of WDYL is very simple and clean with single search box with a button image of white heart on blue background. Cute... The interesting part is that when you brows WDYL without www., you get a 404 (page not found) error.
Type in search box and click on heart, WDYL will display search result from different google’s products on single page neatly arranged in a grid format. There’s a slider on the left part of the page which you can move to quickly access bottom of the page. A big thing that is missing here is Google search result. I think Google search result was supposed to be the first one to be included in this. I have no idea why Google has excluded "Google Search Result" from WDYL? The concept of WDYL reminds me of iGoogle, a service that lets you add simple apps/websites to your own personalized portal. Overall, it’s a cool idea. You will be able to browse more of the found content without leaving the page. I also found out a few Google products that I didn’t know existed. Cool Idea but I can’t see much use of it in long term. I am including WDYL in my Google’s failed products list. Just another failed product by Google.
WDYSAWDYL (What Do You Say About WDYL(What Do You Love?)?). Why don’t you try out WDYL with different search query and share your interesting discoveries and experiences with me through comment to this post below?
For past two-three months, google has been using google’s + 1 button on its websites and this is also available to the third party websites. Google +1 button wants to encourage user engagement and social interaction. This is an interesting idea, clearly influenced by the Facebook “Like” button.
With a single click, Google users can recommend a service, a website, an article, or a topic. Consequently, their friends, families, networks or even the rest of the world may easily see their recommendations. For example say you want to search best pub in Bangalore and you will be able to see recommended pub sites, your friend has pressed the +1 Button on. This is an interesting idea, clearly influenced by the Facebook “Like” button, but very much depends on people taking the time to press the +1 button. The Like button on Facebook allows users to publicly show they like a certain person, status, event etc. meaning it is far more a tool of self-expression than recommendation. Both Facebook’s like and Google’s +1 button aim to increase users’ exposure and awareness to an association of persons of the same trade, pursuits or mutual interests, and subsequently gather them through a social network.
Google and Facebook values what their users are sharing with their friends. They use this to know more about the users and to be able to place appropriate ads (targeted marketing) on web pages. Google will be able to personalize the user's search result and search ads. With the help of the +1 button, people with Google accounts who are signed in may see the recommendations from people in their Gmail or Google Talk chat list.
In my opinion, Google +1 will not be able to compete with Facebook in the social networking arena. Facebook has the edge in this area because its users spend a lot of time sharing their thoughts, links, and photos to their friends. This is a problem for Google because the Google doesn't have access to this information and it can’t be indexed as well.
My concern is, do we really need Google +1? We already have FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn and hundreds of social networking websites too. I think Google has arrived too late to make a big impact in the social networking world. Is google +1 another failed products by google?
I have added +1 button at the start and at the end of this post. Please do share it.
8th September, The day when Google officially announced and added another milestone to make search easier, faster and efficient. Google Instantgives result as you type. you will get your search result faster than your typing speed.
I have been using it since the last 2 days and I have only one sentence to describe this i.e. “It’s mind blowing.” Here is some more insight to Google Instant and my first impression of it.
Features of Google Instant:
There are mainly 3 features of Google Instant:
Instant search result: you get your search results before you can type. As soon as you start typing, Google Instant automatically shows results for a popular search that begins with those letters . You get your results before you finish typing your query and hitting enter.
Predicted result: Google instant predicts what you are going to type next and gives predicted search query in search textbox in gray text. This predicted search query remains until you type next character.
Scroll to search: Using up and down arrow keys you can scroll to suggestions and you get a updated search result page as you move on the suggestions. No need to click on “google search” button, no need to hit "enter" anymore.
Google says that Google Instant saves 2-5 seconds per search query and I can clearly see that it is saving our search time.
Also, Google has integrated safe search in Google Instant. If you want to search any uncensored adult things, Google Instant doesn’t suggest anything. You will need to hit enter in order to get search result.
Is it really effective? Generally, when we search anything, we have search query or phrases in our mind and we search or type accordingly. Here in Google Instant for every character, the search result page is being loaded or refreshed. The screen is flickering with results while typing query. I think this is very distracting to user. Also I can not see any improvement in the quality of search results. It is fast and instant but search results are same as what we get in normal google search.
I think Google Instant is targeted at mobile phone users who are going to be the major revenue sources for google in the upcoming years. Predictive search result is similar to predictive text options which are used in smart phones and designed specifically to expedite the speed of typing on tiny keyboards.
Overall, I really like the instant results and seeing how the results change with just the addition of one letter. It will be interesting to see how the public take to it and adapt themselves to new search techniques.
Please let us know your views and experiences of Google Instant.
This is a guest article by a very good friend of mine and author of www.mindcron.com.
Mergers, Takeovers, Buying businesses and Strategic acquisitions are the best management activity to become the no. 1 and expanding the business throughout the globe. Most of the corporate icons have eagle eyes for the strategic acquisitions in current corporate scenario.
Why not? There are lots of successful examples in front of us. Mittal Steel Company is sitting on the top of the steel world, Bharti Airtel has got 5th ranking in telecom industries after acquiring Zain and there are lots of lot stories.
IT industries are more aggressive in acquisitions and mergers. Microsoft has more than 200, IBM has more than 90, HP has around 100, CISCO has more than 140 and TCS has around 12 acquisitions and mergers to show global presence.
ORACLE is not lagging behind of anybody and has a remarkable record of corporate strategic acquisitions in the world of information technologies.
"GOOGLE", whenever we hear this word there is only one thing which comes to our mind i.e "INNOVATION". Yes, Google is a synonym of "SUCCESS" and "INNOVATION" and my readers might have observed that till now we (Team GeekOnNet) have written only about it’s successful projects/product or successful innovation. But this time we are going to change the trend and we are going to write about Google’s failed product/project
My readers must be wondering, but it's true. Like other biggies (Microsoft, Apple etc.) Google too has a list of failed products/projects . Let's discuss some of its biggest flop products one by one.
1)Google Video: It was a clone of Youtube and other video sharing sites, But unfortunately it wasn’t able to generate traffic or revenue. This product became useless after the acquisition of youtube. I have no idea why is google video still alive.
2)Google Lively: Lively was a Three-Dimensional universe where user could create different 3-d a avtar and could interact with other avtars. Google launched Lively on July 8, 2008 as an experiment in providing people with more ways to express themselves on the Web. Again, people didn’t like it and google had to close down this project on 31 dec 2008.
3)Google Buzz: Yes, I am considering this Twitter look-a-like product as failed product. I have already predicted that this product is not going to be as useful as other Google products are.
4)Orkut: issshh... Is it a failed product? I think it is a semi failed product. As you can see in my "war of online social networks" post, orkut has least number of active users compared to 2 other biggies like Facebook and MySpace. Orkut is popular in south Asian countries like India, Pakistan and South American countries like Brazil, Argentina etc.
5)Friend Connect: Friend Connect allows users on the internet to connect with their friends on different websites. I see only few websites and blogs are using this service. 6)Wave: I have no idea what is happening with this over hyped product.
7)Google Page Creator: Google Page Creator was a website creation and hosting service by Google. The service had been shut down in 2009, while existing published pages migrated to Google Sites.
8)Google latitude: I have not heard a too much about this product. This product allows a mobile phone user to allow certain people to track their location.
There are few other products like Knol, Google Health which never met their target audience and became useless. Sometimes it happens that our expectations and predictions go wrong. I think the above list is not too big for a company like Google.
I am sure we will keep loving Google even after seeing the above list. Google is something which has changed everyone's life and continues to make life more comfortable. If you have any other Google’s failed product in your mind please write as comment to this post. I will add that to my list. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I would like to thank Mr. Sanjit for his valuable information. I am enhancing the above list. iGoogle, Google click-to-call, Google NoteBook, Google SideWiki, GOOG-411, Google Answers Thanks again!!!
Google is always upto something new. But this time it enters the already trodden path of Microsoft's Bing. Like Bing it would give you an option of personalizing your search background. Bing had this feature right since its launch.
How does one configure it? Its very simple, go to the Google search home page, you can see a link "Change background image" on the bottom left of the page. Click on the link and you get a popup where you can upload your favorite image from your PC, from your picasa album or from google's public album. Upload the image and you are done. Your favorite search engine page is now customized and personalized for you.
If you really like the old black & white classy background, click on link "Remove background image" and revert your changes.
What is Google trying to prove with this feature?Is Google trying to say that it's main competitor is Bing? I have almost forgotten Bing, but thanks to Google, I am reminded of Bing again. Is Google forcing us to use Bing?
Please write your ideas and views as comments to this post.
You often see a pop up window in orderto upgrade your older version of firefox. More than 1 million users have downloaded and installed firefox 3.6 since its launch in mid January.
I have observed that since last week or two this pop up is appearing rather frequently. Does this mean that Mozilla is aggressively forcing us to upgrade our firefox?
This popup window appears after 60 seconds of keyboard activities and comes with 3 options "Ask Later", "No Thanks" and "Get the New Version". If you opt for "Ask Later" the popup window will come after 24 hours. If you chose - "No Thanks" and decide later to upgrade firefox, you will just need to run "Check for Updates" from help menu.
Performance: According to Mozilla, Firefox 3.6 is some three times faster than Firefox 3.0, and about 20% faster than 3.5. The most noticeable new feature in the new Mozilla browser is Personas, which allows users to personalize the look of Firefox. Other new features are, a "plug-in updater" that will detect out-of-date plug-ins, "form complete", and open video and audio via HTML 5 for full-screen display and poster frames.
Firefox 3.6 is not a major release so please do not expect any revolutionary changes in web browser technology.
Should we dump IE (Internet Explorer)? Tell me your answer as comment to this post.
"When everyone is playing social games with friends, then why play akele?" This is the main tagline of an Indian social networking website for its recently launched social games. Being a Internet freak I feel that these games are just a newer version of the old stand-alone games. With better internet speeds and lots of social networking, the games have spread their wings from just being played on standalone PCs to now being played directly in the cloud. We can name this family of games as Game 2.0.
Game 2.0 is simply an integration of simple games made on some server side scripts, action scripts like JS or ajax, Flash and implemented on Web 2.0 (aka social networking).
For the newbies, let me tell you that social games are web based games which you can play with friends, mostly on social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut, Myspace etc. In this post I will give a brief about the biggest players in development of social games, and compare them in terms of market share, funding, revenue and business model.
We are already familiar with the popularity of the first generation social networking startups like Facebook, Myspace, Orkut etc. Now a new generation of application developers have taken center stage, who are based mostly on these gen1 social networking sites, and are making big money. The top 3 in my list are:
Company: Zynga (www.zynga.com) Funding: $219M Major Apps:Farmville- 61M Players, Mafia Wars- 25.8M , Yoville- 19.8M, Texas Hold Em’ Poker- 18.3M Revenue: Estimated $200M Zynga is a srong candidate for 2010 IPO.
Company:Playfish (www.playfish.com) Acquired: by Electronic Arts (EA Sports) for $400M Major Apps:Pet Society- 20.5M, Restaurant City-17.3M, Country Story- 8M Revenue: Estimated $135M
Company:Playdom (www.playdom.com) Funding:$47M Major Apps:Mobsters -14M, Bumper Stickers-11.7M, Own Your Friends-10.1M, Sorority Life-7.1M, Mobsters 2-3.5M, Poker Palace- 1.5M Revenue: Estimated $60M
Let me just remind you that these companies are startups and have existed for not more than three years. So, how are they making this much of BIG money? All of them have two revenue models, and these two models are like the necessary practices for companies in this domain.
The first model is very simple and straight forward. It begins when you start playing any of these games. Initially everything is free in the game. But as you move ahead in the game you will need a lot of virtual stuff - like seeds for your farm or guns for your gang - which you would have to buy from an online store using a credit card, PayPal etc. The idea is very simple here - get addicted to the free version, then start spending real money for virtual stuff. Playdom has gone a step ahead and even opened offline stores for virtual goods.
The second model is the traditional online revenue model using ad clicks, lead generation and toolbar installation, but in an entirely new fashion. If you do not have a credit card or a PayPal account, then you sign up on some other website to get virtual money, which you can use to buy some virtual stuff. The cache here is that when you sign up for that website you are actually generating leads for them. When you signed up on the other website, the gaming company gets real money for the lead generation. You can call this SGL (Social Game Lead), and this lead to companies is a guaranteed lead, as the user needs the virtual stuff, which means he is willing to pay if you can sell him the virtual stuff, i.e. if you can do some SGM (Social Game Marketing).
Toolbar installation revenue model is more interesting. When you install a toolbar, it will make Ask.com (say) the default search engine on your browser. Ask.com makes money from search ads and pays money to gaming company or the toolbar developer for every installation of the toolbar. Ask.com pays about $1-$2 for every installation. Just imagine how the money is flowing back to the game developer. Ask --> Toolbar developer -->Zynga --> Facebook (for ads) --> Zynga. This is an endless circle. Hats off to this revenue model.
In the beginning of this post I had quoted a tagline - ...why play akele (i.e. why play alone)? This tagline is being used by an upcoming Indian social gaming website - Ibibo.com. The tagline suggests how new players are trying to capture the potentially large Indian market. The reason I wrote 'potentially' large market was that though the Indian market is very large, but the revenue models might not work out here that easily. You will find less than 5% of the Indian gamers buying online stuff. So, your game might be a very big hit here, but you might not be making any money out of it.
If you were not able to make money out of this market, then this potentially big market could turn out into a potential risky market. Another reason why I say so is that these game developers are not paying any attention to localization, rather Indian-ization, of the games. The big developers have simply imported their international versions to India, and the local developers are merely copying the international games. They have not even cared to give Indian names. For instance, Ibibo has a game called Teen Patti, which is a card game. They have explained the rules using names like Aces and Jacks, which most of the Indian audience would not understand. Had they cared to mentioned that Ace means 'Ekka' and Jack means 'Gulaam' the public out here would have simply loved it.
Zynga and Playdom have opened up their Indian development centers in Bangalore, and they are planning to develop games purely for the Indian audience. I hope they keep their promise, and also hope that the Indian developers like Ibibo give some genuine thought rather than simply copying ideas. The competition is going to become more fierce as biggies like EA are soon going to join the race.
We still have a few unanswered questions to ponder over - will the potentially big Indian market grow into a real market for the developers, and what new things can be integrated with social networks to make more money out of this seemingly big market?
A warm happy new year to all my audience. 2010 brings with it a lot of predictions and hopes.
what would be the top 10 most wanted gadgets of 2010
Will google's nexus-1 beat I-Phone
Will twitter start making profit etc
So why not we (geekonnet team) predict the future. Being internet freaks, Many people came to us asking about the future of web2.0 or in a way web 3.0 "The next generation web".
Web 1.0: Lets go back back to 1991 when the first WWW was released to the public. The period of 1991 to 2001 (before the bursting of dotcom bubble), Web 1.0 was mainly concerned with the static html pages, guest book, forms etc. HTML extensions like " blink" and "marque " tag was introduced during the browser wars in this period of time. The biggest achievements of web1.0 were GeoCities and hotmail. GeoCities was purchased by Yahoo! for $3.57 billion in January 1999. Yahoo! closed GeoCities on October 26, 2009. There were atleast 38 million user-built pages on GeoCities before it was shut down. The GeoCities Japan version of the service is still available. Everyone knows the hotmail story, founded by the wonder boy Sabeer Bhatia. Hotmail was sold to Microsoft for 400 million dollars in 1997. At that time it had around 9 million users. Thus roughly the total number users of web 1.0 were around 45-50 million.
Web2.0: This is the current web which we are using. The bursting of dotcom bubble in 2001 was the main turning point for the internet. New technologies also played a big role in the transformation of internet from web1.0 to web2.0. Google revolutionized the search on the web. The concept of user generated content came and changed the entire web. This generation of web is mainly about the sharing of knowledge and content. Web like facebook, google have changed the entire business model of an online business. The total number of users of web2.0 are more than a billion.
Now these are the predictions for the new web form that is coming up:
Web3.0: Web3.0 will be based on the "intelligent" web applications. The main things which will be used are "Natural Language Processing (NLP)", "Machine Learning languages". Our information and datas will be linked to each other and will be organized in order to make our web intelligent. Our next generation search engine will be based on the semantic and not only on just the keywords. We will not have to surf again and again. The browser will do this for us. One can visualize the web3.0 as a global database which has every data and information. Web3.0 will be more personalized, Intelligent and mobile (anytime anywhere).
We are sorry for not updating you all with some of the current changes that has been going around. We are finally again back to business telling you all about a product that has been doing the rounds-Sixth Sense.
How does one perceive and see things around? To begin with, it is a silly question. We have our five sense organs for it, and wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were a sixth sense too? Today seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling are not the only information required to decide the credibility of an object. Why else would ‘Google’ be so popular! But you cannot always ‘log on’ when you need information and knowledge about the object in front of you. That’s where Sixth Sense comes in.
Sixth Sense- it connects the digital world to the physical one. The device (which can be worn around the neck) consist a projector, a mirror, a camera connected to the cell-phone and colored caps (like rings) which are put on the tips of thumb and the forefinger. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user's hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques. The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers (visual tracking fiducials) at the tip of the user’s fingers using simple computer-vision techniques. The movements and arrangements of these fiducials are interpreted into gestures that act as interaction instructions for the projected application interfaces. The maximum number of tracked fingers is only constrained by the number of unique fiducials, thus SixthSense also supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction. It is just like watching search results only without a required screen!
The Sixth Sense device caters to a variety of needs, like map navigation. The fingers would allow zooming in an out of the map layout and help search the exact location. If you buy some stuff, it will pop up all the information available about it, so you get the best deal. The drawing tool helps draw on any surface using the fingers. It recognizes free hand gestures too. Using hands ‘framing’ gestures, will click pictures and then later you can flip through those pictures. SixthSense also lets the user draw icons or symbols in the air using the movement of the index finger and recognizes those symbols as interaction instructions. For example, drawing a magnifying glass symbol takes the user to the map application or drawing and ‘@’ symbol lets the user check his mail. The SixthSense system also augments physical objects the user is interacting with by projecting more information about these objects projected on them. For example, a newspaper can show live video news or dynamic information can be provided on a regular piece of paper. The gesture of drawing a circle on the user’s wrist projects an analog watch.
The mind behind this intriguing device is Pranav Mistry, an Indian Student pursuing PhD in the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT’s media lab. His work in detail can be viewed at www.pranavmistry.com
