In 2007 a company came up with a crazy startup idea. They were going to hire human beings to respond to online search queries. Yeah, you got it right. When you search for a particular thing on ChaCha there will be a human responder to replies back. What good does that do? I mean who will wait while another human Google and others for your query and returns the cream of the information. No doubt the plan did not fare well then.

But ChaCha evolved with time. They launched a mobile service. There are still more mobile phones than computers with internet connections. So finding a right service to utilize wide market should be profitable. ChaCha did just the same and the plan clicked.

When you are travelling or out of internet reach it hard to access information. So a simple SMS to which you get the exact information searched by a human is great. There will be of course some advertisements involved. For example ChaCha sends you a related ad just after you submit your query. It is shortly followed by the real search result.

ChaCha does not stop there. They innovated further. The plan obviously evolved from the idea of repeating questions. They started archiving answered queries on their websites. Like Yahoo Answers and Answers.com ChaCha archives tend to rank higher in search engines for being human edited and verified information sources. These pages come with a lot of ads that brings good revenue.

ChaCha Web Archives

Have you ever wished that you could somehow integrate your voice calls with web applications? Well, look no further as Twilio has just answered your prayers.

Twilio, a startup based in San Francisco takes the concept of cloud computing to the next level. It provides an in-cloud API for voice communications that leverages existing web development skills, resources and infrastructure.

The concept has gained rave reviews and the startup recently closed a round of funding raising $3.7 million dollars. Reputed angel investors such as Dave Mcclure and Albert Wenger have joined the board of directors for Twilio.

Twilio provides easy quickstart guides on its website on setting up your company’s accounts and writing the simplistic XML code to start off your application with a reasonable pricing scheme. They also provide a free trial with a simple and easy way to try out their APIs. You can check their tour guide before deciding to try it out.

Their Youtube channel provides helpful information on their products and integration with other applications as well. Give it a try!

IBM’s India Research Lab has been working on a very interesting innovative project for the past couple of years called the Spoken Web project.

As its name suggests, the concept behind the project is to make information technology accessible to the developing world through a speech driven process. The lack of literacy in several parts of the world inhibits the spread of IT due to a major challenge posed by the inability to read the content.

This is where the spoken project breaks down the barrier. After a lot of analysis and understanding IBM Labs have provided a solution by comparing the growth factor of the mobile phone industry in developing countries.

The concept applied here is that although the common man cannot read/write, they can talk & listen. An interesting fact noted during this observation is that although the internet has penetrated 17% of the world’s population, the mobile phone has reached almost half of the world’s population.

With this vision the spoken web project had been created with the mobile phone as the access device and voice as the medium. This results in the overcoming of the following barriers to the common man who cannot read/write – no need for a PC/laptop/notebook and no need for a connection to the internet.

IBM has developed a new protocol — Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (HSTP) — which is similar to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which is the underlying medium for the project.

The key enabling technologies included in this project are as follows:

1. VoiGen – VoiceSite Creator
2. VoiHost – VoiceSite Hosting Engine
3. HSTP – Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol
4. WWTW Browser – World Wide Telecom Web Browser

An in-depth coverage of the above technologies can be found at the research project’s website. The spoken web is a network of voice sites conceived in late 2004 by Arun Kumar initially and joined by Nitendra Rajput later in mid-2005. The project has been in place since  mid-2008. Some pilot projects have been implemented in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat in the form of Voikiosk and has met with significant success.

A brief preview about the technology can be viewed on YouTube. The spoken web project has found practical implementations in various sectors – business, healthcare, agriculture and public services. It would be interesting to see how this technology develops and what further implementations take place from here on. We would definitely hope to see it spread out to other developing nations as well.

Cyber Security (src:beliefnet.com)

President Obama appointed Howard Schmidt the Cyber Security chief ending a long seven month search. He has been a familiar White house face being George Bush’s advisor. Online security was one of his major agendas in election. He handpicked candidates for the post but most of them declined the offer.

Mr Schmidt has also been a former Microsoft and eBay star and boasts of  40 years of experience in “government, business and law enforcement”. In a White House video message he said “In our digital world the information technologies we depend on every day present us with great opportunity and great danger.”

You might find it interesting that the previous acting chief of Online Security Melissa Hathaway stepped down in August complaining that the post did let her do any thing good. Now mr Schmidt faces a Herculean job of organizing various Govt. security agencies under one command and getting the big job done.

We wish him all the best. (Report on BBC)

Today social media is the hottest area for advertisement. Every big business concentrates its effort to spread the word on social networks whenever there is a new product launch. Sporting Gear Giant Adidas has taken this strategy seriously and churned out an online marketing campaign with an application combining Facebook Connect and Google Maps.

Star Wars Death Star Superlaser is set in the typical star war backdrop.

A new alliance under the command of Lord Vader, the evil empire has mobilized their ultimate weapon, the Death Star. The Space Station moves swiftly across the universe to a remote galaxy to deliver a message to a small blue planet called EARTH.

The application automatically scans your Facebook profile picture and targets your city on Google map, leaving a huge crater the shape of Adidas Logo. You can then choose friends from Facebook and use the map to blast away their street. A message is delivered to the user you wipe out from the surface of earth.

Vader Finds me on Earth

I was momentarily pissed off with Humanity for their inhuman action on Pandora ( Avatar Mania you see) and felt like blowing away some cities. So I targeted Greg’s San Francisco and Fardeen’s Dubai for some revenge.

Setting Target on Dubai

Blasted a Square in San Fransisco

Its amusing so give it a try. And yeah it does feature a nice collection of shoes.

Dont ask me what I want for X'mas

Google’s seemingly over ambitious book digitization project hit another hurdle as it was fined 300,000 euro for violating copyright of some French books. This is not the first instance of legal blockades on Google’s path to information supremacy. Its deal with US publishers was declared to be violating anti-trust law.

French publisher La Martiniere had filed a lawsuit some three year before and Google did not heed the warning, continuing to scan more books. The French publishers association has expressed satisfaction over the ruling. But given that the initial charges pressed on Google were 15 Million Euros they should not be satisfied

Paris court condemned Google of copyright infringement and ordered them to pay a fine of 300,000 Euros and an interest of 10,000 Euros per day of delay.

Google aims at making scanning millions of books and indexing the text using optical character recognition. But this idea had many challengers that included Microsoft and Yahoo.

Google’s reaction:

French readers now face the threat of losing access to a significant body of knowledge and falling behind the rest of internet users.

Google has launched a new URL shortening service that they claim is more stable, secure and faster. This service is going to compete with market leaders like tinyurl.com and bit.ly. Welcome to goo.gl.

How Google is going to change the world with its own mini urls is not clear right now, at least to my eyes.  But it did not want to be left out of the widely popular service. Almost every one who uses micro blogging site Twitter would know what good is a short url. If you aren’t aware of this short url thing then, just for your information, this is a way of making links smaller. (some thing like http://www.mashyep.com/2009/12/contributor-twitter-testing-business-features/ becomes http://bit.ly/5EW47e )

According to the official Google Blog, this service being hosted on Google’s global infrastructure, will be synonymous to –

• Stability: Google’s scalable, multi-datacenter infrastructure provides great uptime and a reliable service to our users.
• Security: As we do with web search, shortened URLs are automatically checked to detect sites that may be malicious and warn users when the short URL resolves to such sites.
• Speed: At Google we like fast products and we’ve worked hard to ensure this service is quick. We’ll continue to iterate and improve the speed of Google Url Shortener.

But this is not some thing you can use to shorten your image locations or posts you want to share independently. Goo.gl is not a ‘stand-alone’ service. It just works as a background url shortening service for the new share feature on Google Toolbar, and Feedburner. They say if this service receives public accolades then they might consider making it a open service. Till then we can share form the toolbar.

Google employees were noted tweeting around about the features of gPhone today. Suddenly the tech-world got more inquisitive and now the news is out. Google has given out samples of its smart phone to its employees. They have been delivered to some employees around the world for testing purposes.

First peek at Google Phone

We had reported about the imminent Android gPhone last month. While people labeled it rumor at that time, now the rumor has put on some bone and skin. As decided before HTC has specially manufactured this handset for Google. Google dictated every bit of the product as its going to be what Google visualizes to be a perfect phone. Like Microsoft’s Zunes this phone will be branded Google though it will be made by HTC. Rumors are around that this is a tailored version of HTC Passion. Unlocker.com posted a leaked image that is shared here.

Here are a few features that the phone is going to feature.

1. A brilliant OLED touch screen
2. Dual mikes to cut out background noise.
3. A very big camera.
4. On screen key board ( inbuilt speech to text for email and stuff)
5. Possibly powerful Qualcom cores
6. Android 2.1 OS

The best part about the Google Phone is that its going to be an unlocked phone. It will be a GSM set available to everyone independent of the network.  So T- Mobile and AT&T will be the fore-runners as gPhone dealers. It would also be available on electronics stores aside competitors from Samsung and Dell who are planning similar Android handsets.

You would have recently read about Nokia suing Apple over infringement of 10 mobile technology patents that it claims as its own. Now Apple has counter-sued Nokia for unethically stealing and using 13 of its intellectual properties. According to Bruce Sewell, Apples VP and General Counsel “Other companies must compete with us by inventing their own technologies, not just by stealing ours”. Apple also accuses that “In response, Nokia chose to copy the iPhone, especially its enormously popular and patented design and user interface.”
VS        

Nokia has been rapidly losing market share in high-end smart phone market to competitors like iPhone, HTC, Samsung etc. But in recent times Nokia has successfully negotiated with other mobile makers for royalties for its patents that the industry describes as ‘basic’. Legal experts feel its highly unlikely that Nokia is making a false claim or that Apple can invalidate these patents, given the fact that 40 or more mobile companies have licensed Nokia’s patents. But the possibility is that Apple could have licensed similar patents from Ericsson or Qualcomm who own most of the mobile technology patents.

Some other people feel Nokia is going through a crunch situation and wants to ride on iPhone popularity to make some fast cash. The biggest question here is “Why did Nokia wait so long?”. Why did you have to sit and watch for two whole years if someone was making billions out of your patents? Rumors abound about possible pressure from licensing companies who also feel iPhone should also pay for what they are paying. We can of course understand the difference in market costs for a product when one competitor has to pay a license fee while the other goes free.

Will this issue go to court? May be, but only 1% of the cases filed make it to the final round. It could end with some third party negotiator jumping in and signing a compromise between two mobile giants. Nokia could also be seeing it as a weapon to put pressure on Apple to agree to its royalty rates. All we got to do is – wait and watch.

A few days ago the Michael Arrington of TechCrunch blew a storm in the Technology world declaring the death of CrunchPad. He had accused Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan of Fusion Garage of treachery and solely responsible for end of CrunchPad project because of “greed, jealousy and miscommunication”. CrunchPad was slated for a 2^nd Dec premier as a joint venture between TechCrunch Company and Fusion Garage but now “joo joo” makes its world debut on 11^th Dec as a Fusion Garage product.

joo joo - tablet PC - Preview

The tech world had till date seen one side of the story and it looked really bad. Michael Arrington posted a blog on Tech Crunch with some seeming detailed information. Now Rathakrishnan has hit back accusing Arrington of failure to deliver on promises. According to Rathakrishnan, he had cracked the idea of a tablet computer to Arrington and that TechCrunch boss had a “flair for the dramatic”.

“Michael made many promises suggesting he will deliver on hardware, software and funding, none of which came true,” said Rathakrishnan. “We had to move on. [Fusion Garage] did the hardware. We had made the software. And we had secured the funding. Michael did not deliver on his promises, and we decided to move on our own.”

Michael Arrington has made it clear that there will be multiple legal proceedings against multiple parties and individuals, including Rathakrishnan. But Rathakrishnan is oblivious of any such notices. We have not seen any hard facts being presented by Fusion Garage in defense against the allegations while TechCrunch did a commendable job painting Rathakrishnan as the villain.