There are 480 million newspapers printed daily; 800 million automobiles registered on the planet; 1.1 billion personal computers including all desktops, laptops, notebooks and netbooks; 1.2 billion fixed landine phones; 1.4 billion internet users; 1.5 billion TV sets; 1.7 billion unique holders of a credit card of any type; and 2.1 billion unique holders of a banking account of any kind. But 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions.

…

So, that is what was the first four billion. The rapid growth of what has become the most widely adopted technology on the planet. Now, what about the topic of the “next 4 billion”, that does sound a bit strange. The world total human population is only 6.7 billion people. Shouldn’t I be saying, “the next 2.7 billion”.

…

So here is the big news. The next 4 Billion will not be like you and me. They will not be wealthy enough to own a PC and have a broadband connection and read blogs or do any Twittering on a PC. Over 95% of the next 4 billion will be in the Developing World, and while there will be of course an emerging middle class who may aspire to own a netbook, those tend to be wealthy enough to already have a subscription today. Those next four billion will be either those who do not have any connection today, at all, or else are second and third subscriptions to those who already have one today.

Read the entire post if you want to learn more about the mobile phone market potential. The numbers are really interesting!

My first reaction was – why the heck they need “Strong Password Policy”? They are just an online help documentation service, not a Credit Card or Bank website. And I absolutely don’t have any personal information stored there.

But anyways, whatever the reason they thought, I convinced myself to change the password. But guess what, their freaking complex “Secure Password Policy” didn’t allow me to create any password which I thought were quite secure enough.

Then I had to read their strong password policy. Here is what it mentioned -

Your password must meet the following criteria:

• Must be at least 8 characters long
• Must include at least 1 number
• Must include at least 1 symbol character (non-letter or number, such as *, %, or #)
• Must include at least 1 lowercase letter
• Must include at least 1 uppercase letter
• Must not include your username, first name, and last name
• These requirements must be met within the first 8 characters

After reading this, I almost had to control myself from hitting my keyboard on the monitor. Do read the each bullet carefully, especially the last one. Why on the earth that service needs this kind of password policy? Believe it or not, even my Credit Card or Bank websites don’t enforce me to create this kind of “strong” password.

In my opinion, these are the types of services, who absolutely don’t get the web usability. Just because someone cracked the code to create strongest password, doesn’t mean that’s the way to go. On top of this stupid requirement, this service neither has a sophistacated interface to navigate through hundereds of documents nor they have smart search engine.

Come on guys, now it’s almost the end of Web 2.0 era. At least now please throw away those Web 1.0 practices and follow the cuttting-edge technologies and practices. Please grow up.

1. Real identity

I started blogging 4 years ago under the brand called Adeology (Aditya’s Ideology). I really loved that name. But when I decided to host it on the same domain name, not surprisingly, the domain name wasn’t available. The closest I could find was Adeologue.com. I blogged under that brand for almost 2 years. But over the period, I got bored of it. I didn’t find it personal anymore. Also, the domain name wasn’t representing my identity. In this social media world, if I’m building my brand, I thought I better build it under one common identity i.e. my real name.

2. Personal domain

When you are writing a personal blog, which is not strictly topic specific, then it’s better you blog under your personal domain. It gives you some flexibility to write posts which are thoughtful, are oriented towards your readership, but are little off from your blog topic. In my opinion, if you are writing a group blog, or a topic specific blog, then you should go for some generic or topic specific domain name. This also gives you some flexibility to add more authors to your blog as co-contributors.

3. New broader focus

At Adeologue.com, I mainly wrote about entrepreneurship, startups, productivity tips for students and recent graduates, and lessons learned from different books. Since last few months, I’ve been spending more and more time in programming and building web applications, I found less and less time for the blogging. After spending more time on building applications, I also wanted to write about programming, hacks, tutorials, tips that I was learning along the way. But I couldn’t write it under Adeologue.com brand, because it was not started with that theme in the mind. Now, I’ll continue to write about entrepreneurship, productivity, tips for students, book reviews, but I’ll also write about small programs, hacks, applications and more. With this new year, new domain, new design, new focus, I’m excited to share more thoughts and more learning with you.

4. Blogging platform

I first started blogging with Blogger.com service. It sucked big time. I never liked that. And I think it still sucks. It was too close and too clumsy. But it was free, so I stuck with it for some time. After it reached my frustration peak, I moved to TypePad.com – a paid subscription service. That was my another mistake. TypePad also sucked big time. I’ve been using TypePad for last 2 years, but I hardly found any improvement in that service over 2 years. The service is slow. It’s usability has some serious issues. The experience was not pleasant. And the worst part – it was paid. It’s still the same TypePad that I started using 2 years ago. I never felt that it was worth for $90/year.

On the other hand, I found WordPress was doing relentless improvement in their blogging platform. And it’s a free solution if you already have the web hosting subscription plan. When I explored its 2.7 release, I was sold completely. It’s smooth. It’s highly usable. It’s fast. It’s simple and beautiful. It has lot of great features. And it is free. This was the turning point for me to move from TypePad to WordPress. I’m loving WordPress. I just regret why I took so long to migrate to WordPress.

5. More control

Another reason I’m loving WordPress is, it gives me complete control over features, layout, design, tools, all without additional cost. I always wanted to have clean, simplified, but CSS rich design for my blog. I could never achieve that on Blogger and WordPress for minimal expenses. Using WordPress, I got complete control over how I wanted to design this blog’s theme. I’m very happy with the result. Simple and clean. More focus on post entries. Fonts are also bigger and clearly readable. The width of post section is also wide enough that I can post some code snippets. Thanks to Lucian Marin’s original simplistic theme.

I hope you are also liking this new blog, and will also like the content of this blog. Let me know any feedback that you may have.

Andrew Chen at Futuristic Play asks a question – Are you a product fanatic?

I think yes, I am.

To answer this question, he mentioend generic characterisitics of product fanatics as below. I have marked those things which I recognize doing most of the times.

1. You think MySpace is soooo ugly => It’s horrible.

2. You only use the best products:
Macbook Pro => Well, not Pro, but regular Macbook
Mac OS X => Yes, I love it.
Firefox => Firefox Fan!
Gmail => I thought that’s the only option we have in Webbased email services
Google Maps => It’s supercool!
Facebook => Those guys are geniuses.

3. You never use the popular products:
Dell => Had this laptop, errr..deskop before! Thank God I switched to Mac!
Windows => Avoid it as much as possible.
IE => IE Means PopUps!
Yahoo Mail => Okay, I lied earlier. I know Yahoo Mail. But it’s too slow!
Mapquest => Hey, I live in Web2.0 World.
MySpace => I still have my senses.

4. You try out new sites and judge them based on their features and functionality => Sometimes yes.

5. You assess a site’s quality based on if it’s written in Ruby versus Java => Not really.

6. You like things simple, functional, and uncluttered – cuz what else would you want? => Exactly!

7. You think your startup’s "secret sauce" is in the technology, or platform, or programming language (LISP!) => Dont’ think so for the most of the times.

8. You don’t require users to give you their emails, because it’s not what you’d want as a user => Nopes! I want it.

9. You say things like, "Just build something people want" => Yeah, and what they want – the fun stuff! Believe me!

10. You secretly worship Steve Jobs => Truely. Now it is no more a secrete.

So I think I’m a product fanatic.

And with this conclusion, I also take Andrew’s advice for not becoming too fanatical about product

• I totally understood now that, Product fanaticism != User fanaticism.
•  I do overlook innovations in other places because of my product fanaticism. I will try to improve that.
•  I will also take atmost care that my product fanaticism don’t lead to beautiful and empty websites.

Thanks Andrew, for this great learning!

pen that captures your handwriting, connects to your PC via
USB, and digitizes your notes. The FLY
Fusion Pentop Computer, as they call it, is an innovative study tool that’s
also loaded with educational and entertaining software.

The FLY Fusion Pentop Computer puts sophisticated computing power right in the palm of your hand.
When
you write with the FLY Fusion Pentop Computer on FLY™ Paper, everything
is automatically captured and digitized. You can then upload it to your
PC and convert to text. It is designed to enhance homework productivity by providing easy
access to subject information for faster problem solving and real-time
homework support. Touch your pentop computer to FLY Paper, and
you can quiz yourself on history, get help with a quadratic equation,
or even play your favorite MP3.

For more information, go to FlyWorld.

Note: If you have noticed such innovations, then
please write it to me at aditya AT adeologue DOT com and I will mention
about it in this series with appropriate credit to the referral.

For more articles from this series, please visit – Innovations.

A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human. "CAPTCHA" is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". A CAPTCHA involves one computer (a server) which asks a user to complete a test. While the computer is able to generate and grade the test, it is not able to solve the test on its own. Because computers are unable to solve the CAPTCHA, any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human. A common type of CAPTCHA requires that the user type the letters of a distorted image, sometimes with the addition of an obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen.

What are the applications?

CAPTCHAs are used to prevent automated software (spamming softwares) from performing actions, which degrade the quality of service of a given system. e.g. they can be deployed to protect systems vulnerable to e-mail spams. CAPTCHAs have also found active use in stopping automated posting to blogs or forums, whether as a result of commercial promotion or harassment. [Source: Wikipedia]

What are the problems?

I sometimes found visual CAPTCHAs to be very disturbing. They are not pleasant and it kills the aesthetic aspect of your website’s UI design. Sometimes they are distorted to such an extent that they are very hard to read. Sometimes it’s just frustrating.

Another problem in accessing CAPTCHA is people who have poor vision or blind, who can not solve the task assigned by CAPTCHA.

What are the innovations?

Based on above problems, I have observed following innovations. Some are already implemented, and some are in the idea phase.

Now days, I have seen many websites providing an audio version of the CAPTCHA in addition to the visual method. Sweet!

Recently, I stumbled upon a website (forgot the name) which has even easier way of identifying if the client is a human being or not by asking a text based CAPTCHA. For both deaf and blind users, this technique will be very helpful as they require additional help in both audio and visual CAPTCHAs. The technique was to ask mathematical questions like "what is 1 + 1" or "what is 3 * 2" or "common sense" questions like "what color is the sky".

I found it very clean, pleasant and neat implementation. It didn’t disturb the aesthetic part of the UI design.

But there might be problems with this technique as well. Either they cannot be automatically generated or they can be easily cracked given the state of artificial intelligence. Due to the lack of security provided by text based CAPTCHAs, most sites still choose to use an audio and visual CAPTCHA as a way of balancing accessibility and security.

But if text based CAPTCHAs have security problems, then there might be ways to get around that issue. But I found them very intelligent and pleasant. Another way to make CAPTCHAs aesthetically clean and secure is using this idea suggested by Seth Godin. I haven’t seen the implementation of this idea yet.

What we need is a centralized CAPTCHA server that everyone can use for free. And how would it be monetized, you ask?

Easy. Logos. It might be for soup or a server or an airline. Type the brand you see above.

Sweet! This approach will not kill the aesthetic aspect of the UI, and at the same time it will be secure and can be monetized.

Let me know if you have seen some more innovative ways of using CAPTCHA.

Note: If you have noticed such innovations, then
please write it to me at aditya AT adeologue DOT com and I will mention
about it in this series with appropriate credit to the referral.

For more articles from this series, please visit – Innovations.

A dual-core device contains two independent microprocessors and a quad-core device contains four microprocessors on a single chip. Cores in a multi-core device may share a single coherent cache (temporary storage area) at the highest on-device  level or may have separate caches. The processors also share the same interconnect to the rest of the system. In order to deliver high computing general-purpose processors, manufacturers such as Intel and AMD have turned to multi-core designs.

The general trend in processor development has been from multi-core to many-core: from dual, quad, eight-core chips to ones with tens or even hundreds of cores. AMD released its dual-core server/workstation processors, the Opteron, and its dual-core desktop processors, the Athlon. Intel launched its quad core processor, and Core Duo microprocessors with dual-core technology.

Tilera Corp. has begun shipping a 64-core processor – TILE64 to customers.
It is targeting embedded applications like networking and
digital video, and is not meant to compete with multicore processors
being marketing by Intel and AMD.

The TILE64 has 64 identical processor cores or tiles — that are interconnected. Each tile is a complete full-featured processor, including integrated
L1 & L2 cache and a non-blocking switch that connects the tile into
the mesh. This means that each tile can independently run a full
operating system, or multiple tiles taken together can run a
multi-processing operating system like SMP Linux.

With a standard ANSI C programming environment, developers can leverage
their existing software investment as well as utilize the vast body of
Open Source code available. Tiles can be grouped into clusters to apply
the appropriate amount of horsepower to each application. Since
multiple operating system instances can be run on the TILE64™
simultaneously, it can replace multiple CPU subsystems for both the
data plane and control plane.


The technology was developed by MIT professor Anant Agarwal, founder of
Tilera; he continues today as the company’s chief technology officer.

PhotoViolationMeter, or PVM,
calls drivers to warn them that the meter is running out of time and
provides a pay-by-phone option to refill the meter. When drivers first
park, they can pay with debit or credit cards, or spare change.

The meters also photograph license plates, providing evidence for
prosecution when cars do violate parking laws. The meters’ sensors
reset each time a car parks in the corresponding space, decreasing the
likelihood cities will lose money on scofflaws who are not caught by
traffic police.
The meters also greet drivers with a message and inform them of specific parking regulations.

Source: EE Times

Note: If you have noticed such innovations, then
please write it to me at aditya AT adeologue DOT com and I will mention
about it in this series with appropriate credit to the referral.

For more articles from this series, please visit – Innovations.

Virtual keyboards are no more a film fantasy now!

Lumio’s technology uses a red laser to illuminate a virtual keyboard outline on virtually any surface. The laser is a visual guide to where to put your fingers. A separate Infrared illumination and sensor module invisibly tracks when and where your fingers touch the surface, translating that into keystrokes or other commands.

This technology has applications in airplane seats, cars, restaurants, home appliances and industrial automation. 

Note: If you have noticed such innovations, then
please write it to me at aditya AT adeologue DOT com and I will mention
about it in this series with appropriate credit to the referral.

For more articles from this series, please visit – Innovations.

Its the right day to write about innovations related to rain or weather forecast as its raining in the Bay Area since morning. And as usual, I didn’t know the weather forecast and I didn’t carry my umbrella. But the Ambient Umbrella can save you from doing such mistakes again in future. It lets you know when rain or snow is in the forecast by illuminating its handle. So you know in advance when to carry your umbrella or not. Light patterns intuitively indicate rain, drizzle, snow or thunderstorms. It basically receives weather data automatically from AccuWeather.com. This product is innovated and commercialized by Ambient Devices.

Note: If you have noticed such innovations, then
please write it to me at aditya AT adeologue DOT com and I will mention
about it in this series with appropriate credit to the referral.

For more articles from this series, please visit – Innovations.