New and Improved Gmail chat features

Google has improved there "Gmail chat" interface. Though u cannot make a voice call form with in the "Gmail chat" there are 2 main enhancements.

First being the Group chat option: Now you can chat with multiple contacts in the same window. i.e. conference. finally the feature which i was awaiting to have in my Gchat.

The second one is about the smiley :) yes, now you go can from B-) to to
Best part is, you can choose in which format you wish to have your emoticons!!!
i like the second one the most....

but y dont we have these option in Gtalk standalone application???

India spearing into Space age with ISRO and TATA's Fuel cell car

TATA and ISRO tie up to propel INDIA in to the space age, this time its not the rockets but the automobile. Tata in alliance with ISRO is gearing up to bring out the prototype of hydrogen based CAR. This Car would run on hydrogen and the exhaust would be JUST water vapour. This is the reason why it has earned the title of "World's most Greenest car"

The technology behind hydrogen based:
Though burning hydrogen releases lot of energy , we are not doing this in the case of hydrogen [Fuel cell] based Cars. (we don't need a bomb behind our cars! do we?)

Making it work is as simple as combining Hydrogen with Oxygen to form water. Believe me this is what is done. During this process electricity is generated and this is used to propel your car.

Below is the ppt which I presented to my class during my engineering , back in 2005


View Full size

The technology sounds simple but practically its not that easy to achieve.There are few points to be considered before jumping to a conclusion.

1. Do we have the required infrastructure to supply hydrogen as fuels to individuals.[Only NASA can afford hydrogen to run its Space expeditions]
2. Safety. How safe we are? carrying highly flammable element very close to us
3. The Cost of the system.
   

This initiative from TATA and ISRO is for prototyping. If you have plans of buying a car , and would want to wait for this prototype car, then i have some suggestions .You not wait for this, because as of now a Hydrogen based car would cost some where around $40,000 !!!




India with such bold initiatives is surely shining. Lets hope India would be the role model for all the 3rd world countries to embrace the new technology and bring down the pollution rate.

wonder blunder

Today morning i received a mail from my bank to my residential address.
I was shocked!! How on earth, i could receive this mail? NO, I wasn't worried about the content of the mail, but the address!!!

Look at the pic below

Do we have Berlin in Karnataka, INDIA???

I am amazed, how could a bank like IDBI could do such a mistake!!.
Still more amazed with the courier service. Phew!!how did they manage to search Berlin in INDIA :P
I think the PIN Code guided those guys to deliver it properly

N95 Application wishlist : Golgoli Game

From the day Nokia announced there N95 mobile, I have been madly following the reviews, User opinion and Nokia's post marketing support.

Every thing seems to be perfect except for the battery and RAM hiccups.

Lately, we are seeing loads of freeware application based on Accelerometer floating around.They look amazing viz. NokMote, Y-Inclinometer, Lightsaber

But what i am eagerly waiting is for an application (rather a game) similar to this.


This is already available on linux based device called Simputer [picopeta now Amidasimputer]

This makes use of the "flip-flop" sensor which on the other side is similar to the N95 Accelerometer sensor.

The game is pretty simple and straight forward.
You need to move all "Balls" called Golis into the centre circle.
And how do you move the balls? this is the most attractive part of this game, By tilting the device.

Being a developer myself, I would love to develop this app , but due to time constraint i would not be able to :(


P.S Simputer is the "Forgotten Soul of Indian PDA "
Visit
http://www.amidasimputer.com
http://www.picopeta.com/

Short range communications protocol like bluetooth , IrDa have been incorporated in mobile phones and also in other devices which require some sort of short range communication.

IrDa has a huge successes in the form of remote controls for TV, Video Playes and other house hold electronics, where as Bluetooth has been the defacto standards for mobile short range communication because of its low power consumption. Although both Bluetooth and IrDa fall under short range wireless communication it did not enjoy the exposure as RFID did.

RFID <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> <!--[endif]-->

Soon you will be able to do an inventory check with your mobile phone. Wondering how? Reading the RFID.

Yes, in future mobiles may come equipped with RFID reader hardware and software. Mobiles have been equipped with Barcode readers[IrDa based] from a very long time. But the sad part is, by the time our mobiles were able to understand this, barcode were almost considered to be obsolete [but still used]

RFID are sonsidered to be the future of identity tagging for all sorts of consumer and industrial goods.

Nokia has come one step closer to achieve there Concept shocased in there "Nokia Concept ph0one Video"

In this video notice the data exchanged between the e devices when they are brought very close together, that is the result of NFC as Nokia likes to call it. The soul behind NFC for mobile devices is JSR 257

The Java Contactless Communication API (JSR 257) enables mobile devices to communicate via short-range wireless means, such as RFID, infrared light, or even Bluetooth, and presents such devices via a simple, homogeneous interface to Java applications. This article explains the role of the Java Contactless Communication API in the emerging field of near-field communications, and provides an example of reading data from any contactless target, including an RFID tag.

BCB5: Brainchunk->Attendence(EAbsent);

Due to some unavoidable circumstances I have to skip BCB5.
So I can not keep up the updates. Apologias to not able to keep up my words.

I will try to get the feedback from fellow bloggers, and if i can understand there experience :) i would try to elaborate on the same

Android: First impression

"The Droid is out"

Everyone on this planet is talking about it, the most awaited "MOBILE PHONE PLATFORM' was introduced to us on 11/05/2007 and days after this we got to see it live in this video.

what was all the hype about? well "When God sneezes! the earth tumbles!!" I think this is what happened in the case of Gphone. When google showed interest in coming into mobile handset market, there were dozens of rumours/hoax flying around, and what we got finally is ANDROID.

The SDK and the underneath platform technology dint impress me.

1. The UI doesn't look COOL enough.
2. Its running on Linux core [Hardware Abstraction Layer- HAL]
3. All the native Components are written in c/c++.
4. Application layer is JAVA so the exposed API's are all java based.

surely it is more than what have been discussed

The best part of ANDROID is the webkit based browser. Goolge has managed to successfully port the worlds most powerful browser available for mobiles to their Linux 2.6 kernel . Webkit is port of Apple's safari based webcore engine.

what does this mean? All most all the phones right from a feature phone to a smartphone and PDA have linux running beneath. Linux has the highest number of users [apart from symbian and WM] in PDA/Smartphone arena. With this port of webkit onto the linux platform we can expect almost all the linux based mobiles to have webkit based browser.Linux mobile enthusiast would be thrilled to use this powerful tool which the symbian users are doing from past 2 years.

finally who is gonna win this race mobile race?
will it be open standard - syambian?
Or open handset platform - Google?
or proprietary and closed - windows mobile , OSX?

its very difficult at this stage to predict anything.With google entering this race, future of mobileswould be worth waiting for.

Nokia Research: The unsung hero

In the case of many heroes, warriors and saints, we only praise and adore there capabilities and achievements. We don't really care about who inspired them, who shaped them to achieve what they are now. Same applies even to the field 0f technology and research. Usually we fail to recognize the men behind the most cutting edge technology coming out in the market, for example Nokia Research Center has been working around the clock to give us a better mobile experience.

http://research.nokia.com

Nokia Research Center (NRC) is a separate unit within Nokia, not attached to anyone of the specific product development business units.

Download the "Nokia Research Center Yesterday - Today - Tomorrow" podcast Presented by Bob Iannucci, SVP, Head of Nokia Research Center.

The Area of research include

1. Access and Connectivity
2. Data and Content Technologies
3. Device Architecture
4. Digital Services
5. Human Interaction
6. Physical Touch Digital Match

Some of the cutting edge applications/ services like Mobile Web Browser, Active monitor, sports tracker are the graduates of NRC

Some of the projects which excites me are MARA, Nokia Computer Vision Library(NCV) and Virtual Office.

What I would expect from MARA and NVC is some sort of a enhancements to the smartphones which helps the blinds to use a smartphone to navigate by getting an visual feed back of there environment. This may not be far from reality.

Though NCR is the incubator for most of the new application from nokia, I haven’t seen many of the blogs / community linking to this site.

Hats off to the people how drive the nextgen cart of NOKIA. They are the true unsung heroes of Nokia.

Happy diwali from orkut

Happy deepavali to every one

Biggest surprise to me for this dewali came from an unexpected source.

I have been busy from last 2dyas and was away from my computer.Today when i log into orkut i saw a special tap on the top right banner.Guess what! orkut wanted to wish us in the best way it could by giving us a new THEME. Enjoy this gift from the worlds most used social networking site.




This is the Orkut -Diwali - Theme


But i was little dissapointed to see this on my google home page


i was expecting some sort of new logo crafted to suite this festival of light :(
[ i thing i was over excited by seeing orkut's new skin for diwali :) ]

But i fond other web giant posing for this special festival.

http://in.yahoo.com/

"Google, Where is my phone?"

All Road leads to "Open Platform".The speculations, hypes and hoax about the Gphone stops at ANDROID, an open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices, which includes includes
An operating system, user-interface and applications -- all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation. This acquisition 2 years back payed off.

This platform was developed in collaboration with the mobile giants like Motorola, HTC , Intel, Broadcomm to name few.
How can we miss Windriver when we are talking about ANDROID. The proposed OS is suspected to be a flavour of windriver Linux.

SDK will be out soon, Waiting to see what will we have in there ;)

What does this openhandsetplatform mean?
simple you will have your..
Google contacts as your Phonebook
Google Calender as your mobile calender
Google Docs as your office suite
Jaiku for SMS
Zingku for MMS
Picassa/Youtube for media

And in case if you wonder , who will be the service provider....
Thing big think "life time" think GrandCentral

everything is so tightly woven around the "WEB"

Lets wait till the Prototype hits the market

Adobe Flashlite 3 on my 3250

Adobe's next gen runtime engine for mobile Flashlite 3 succeeds FL2.1 with enhanced features like Flash video a.k.a FLV format , MMI extensions for UI design and also as a plug-in to the web browsers.In short this means, we would be able to watch FLV on s60 phones.

I got my developer edition FL3 player couple of days back.The most interesting part is that its running on my Nokia 3250 which is a Symbian S60 3rd Edition handset.

[Note: According to Adobe, the current device which supports FL3 and its FLV playback is N95]


Thanks to Giorgio Natili i was able to play flv video for the first time on my Mobile.
below is a pic i composed to detail out the FL players





The video which i recorded [running the FLV video playback application] is a huge file so cannot upload :|

Update: Adobe Labs has released there FL3 [Developer Edition] to the public.You can download the Standalone player from Adobe Labs.

Please Note This installer only supports standalone content and cannot be used to view SWF files that are embedded in a mobile web browser or to test any type of personalization content such as wallpapers or screensavers.

The Website also instructes that The Flash Lite 3 Developer Edition has been certified by Adobe for the Nokia N95 (non-US 3G version) only.

But the Developer Edition Flash lite is running on my 3250. So go ahead at give it a try with your S60 3rd Edition devices including N80 and N73 :)