jodhpuriGuy | Avi Mehta

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.

(more…)

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 :)

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…