jodhpuriGuy | Avi Mehta

So yesterday, I talked about hITEC, The other project I was working on is called MoMedia. This project was similar to “Video On The Wall“, more generalized, more Mobile based and had Social Networking at its heart. Here are some details from our notes:

• To create a location based blogging service for Mobile Phones (You can upload Images, Videos, Text or Audio)
• Provide an engaging UI for users to view other people in the neighborhood who are blogging from the same platform.
• Create a social networking experience by allowing users to follow others(twitter anyone?), add other users as friends/fellow workers etc.
• Integrate the network with Facebook, Orkut, twitter so that status updates can be propagated to all networks. (Friendfeed ? - I guess so just  that when we thought of the idea, it wasn’t there)
• Provide users with a blog and allow users to specify their own blogs like wordpress and blogger so that posts can be posted their directly without any action on user’s part.

The screen shots follow after the break.

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I have not been active on the blog for quite some time. The reasons being the heavy course load and the work that I have been involved in. Two of the projects that I was working on for quite some time got over last week. One of them, hITEC had the final presentations last Friday. We were a team of 5 people from different departments at UCI and we worked over the last 3 months on this project. The details follow:

Video On The Wall

The project revolved around the idea of Citizen reporting. The new thing in our case was the clever use of  technology that we used and the ease of use and no cost of involvement on user’s part. The main features of the project can be described as:

• Reporters(anyone can be one!) stream videos(yes live!) from their mobile phones. (We used android as our mobile client but it is not limited to that in any way!)
• The web client, that can be accessed through the browser, shows the videos that are currently being streamed and also provides access to the archived videos.
• Use of mobile platform features like the location determination to show relevant content.
• Instant feedback from the browser to the mobile phone thus creating an experience of interactive media.
• Lucrative revenue model and sharing of revenue with Reporters.

Technology-wise, The project involved development of mobile client on Android (Java), Server in Ruby on Rails and Flash for Video streaming and interactive experience.

Below are some of the screenshots of the web client. (Mobile client simply streams videos with a few other simple screens thus nothing much to show there…)

UPDATE: The announcement of the competition results can found here.

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Today Google released their new App Engine. This is seen as a direct competetor of Amazon Web Services (AWS). The service started applications for accounts for developers tonight at 9:30. Some of the features of the service are:

• Comes with a SDK! - start developing even if you dont have an account yet!
• Develop applications in Python - now you know why Google is hiring so many devs with python exp ;)
• Free 500 MB of data and upto 5 million page views a month!
• Integration with other google services so authentication etc need not be developed if not so important(instead use google’s account or sth.)

But there are a few limitations too…

• A limit of 1000 results per query(do we need more then that anyway?)
• Only three applications in the preview period.
• Just python is supported for now
• Only 10000 accounts to be given initially! (Yes I got one already :)

It can certainly be called as a competitor to AWS but is yet to get all the features and take a full form… More updates on techcrunch

I look forward to do somehting with it soon… after 14th that is :)

ThunderBird is an email client from Mozilla. Although it has been around for quite some time, I somehow never got to get all my mails out from Yahoo or GMail to my PC. But a few days back, it all changed. I finally decided to give it a try. There were certian basic requirements that I needed that Gmail did not give me so easily and so I had to resort to this.

• Download all mail to my pc (yeah I know… kindof stupid)
• Have a nice calendar which I can look at while I am looking at mails.  This is important coz I never open Google Calendar to look at my events(yes all my events are there on it..). It’s simply too much trouble.
• Compose mail offline and send it off later on.
• Have a good Address Book - Somehow the FF3 Beta4 was not displaying my address book properly(In Beta5 it has been fixed).
• New email notification! - Yes Gmail has this, but we need to install other things which I dont want to. So I just used AT&T’s TTS service to create two nice audio files for “New Mail” and “Somethi’s up in [the] calendar” and am using them with TB and lightening.

So, I installed TB 2 and also added lightening and Provider for google calendar to it.  When I installed them, they did not work as well as I wanted them to - The offline read+write access to google calendar was not available. But just 2-3 days back, both of them got updated and they now support offline cache of the calendars. The two add-ons also got a nice UI update(not as good as FF3 is going to be though).

The only problem I have right now is the absence of a good Sync app between GMail and TB contact list. CSV is not good enough as it does not let me store all the fields from GMail properly. What I’d like is a way to map fields from Gmail Address Book to TB fields(dynamic! - I dont have a good parallel for this except for the Auto Organize feature in MediaMonkey :)).

Overall, I think I am doing fine with TB and might continue using it.

Heard of Google Reader? Well That’s my homepage and it’s probably the page with second highest hits from me. Anyways, I follow a lot of popular blogs and come across point-of-views from many good “blog” writers. Recently, I have been noticing a pattern that is kind of amusing. The first incident related to this, If I stretch my memory would be when Loren Feldman of 1938media.com reviewed Seesmic. The review got quite a lot of attention and people involved were instantly famous. Recently though, the trend has been increasing with a post from Scoble or Mike  or someone else every other week getting caught in blogosphere and getting tossed around. Just today, Paul Graham had to post more notes on his last post coz that one got caught on the blogstream.

So why am I commenting on all this? Well because it really is funny to see how things are changing on the internet and how similar it looks to those Indian TV Reality shows.

Hello there!

I am moving over to a place which I think is better… Obviously my blog goes along with me. Head over to http://jodhpuriguy.com for the latest updates and new content.

avi

Google published the initial documents about OpenSocial API yesterday. Wondering what it is? Well look here. OpenSocial has been referred to as (one of) the biggest competitions to Facebook. If you have used facebook, you would have heard of the thousands of applications that are available on facebook. These applications are not developed by FB but by other developers from other companies. The powerful platform and the user reach has been the biggest advantage of facebook. And it was looking like it is going to be difficult for anyone to reach their level anytime soon.

Then came the news about OpenSocial. The fact that more than 200 other web organizations(the participants include myspace, Hi5, flixter etc…) are taking part and going to actively support OpenSocial was interesting. It would lead to several changes in the field of “Social Networking”. One thing I see in near future is the facebook-isation of orkut. We have had the “Updates” feature available on orkut for quite some time. This “Wall” would provide a platform for app developers a medium for communication. You will soon be able to add applications to orkut the same way you do it in facebook.

Now this could very well lead to a direct consequence: Google competing with a lot of products from other companies. For example I saw the “Ask Friends” feature on orkut recently. Although it is not mentioned anywhere that it uses openSocial Api, I would not be surprised if it did use it. The reason why I mentioned it is that, with this feature, Google is directly taking on Yahoo Answers!(which is way ahead at least for now…). This and I believe many more things that are yet to come will probably change the perception of limits of Social Networking…