Basic Text Analytics in E-Mail & Other Applications

I have wondered why many of the web-based or desktop-based e-mail providers do not include some smartness in their software. Some basic if not simple (to implement) things are:

Trying to send a mail without an attachment when the mail text says that there is an attachment.

Extracting meeting schedule information – date, time, place or web conference info and subject of meeting, from the mail text.

GMail has introduced some smartness into its service for detecting #1. I am not sure about #2 above, whether it is implemented or not. May be some beta version of it is already there. But I got curious today on the pop-ups like the following that I got.

But it remains to be seen how good their implementation is and one can never get a perfect one!!



A Report on MAC India 2009

I had been to Mobile applications Conference India last week since I eager to check how much the enthusiasm is, for mobile apps development locally in India? There were around 800 people and there were also 15-20 exhibitors.  Sun Startup Essentials & Forum Nokia were present but we were missing an operator presence – the organizer SiliconIndia should make sure that they bring in an operator – they are many now – to hear their point-of-view. I am happy to see a ‘critical mass’ developing here in this area. There were:

• Arvind Rao from OnMobile which is one of the leaders in this space currently.
• Prakash Sayini from Forum Nokia.
• Bakshish Dutta from Sun Startup Essentials.

There were other speakers from TCS, InMobi, TeleDNA, MChek, Navteq, Satnav, MapMyIndia, etc. The event was well organized by SiliconIndia. I have summarized the key points for start-ups in this space, as advised by the various speakers & panel discussions:

I have shared some of the keep points that were brought out by the speakers & also during the panel discussions:

1. Indian consumers are value conscious and there are very few people using high-end phones. Understand the needs of the  target niche segment of users for your mobile app first – instead of just developing a ‘me too’ app.
2. There is no one killer app, there are many killer apps for different user segments.
3. Speech and not data is the lowest common denominator for most of the phones & users. Main reason why  OnMobile started to develop speech based apps first. Their techies had experience from Philips & Nuance projects in Infosys.
4. Be patient – OnMobile was not successful immediately. At one point they were even thinking of closing the shop but fortunately they had VCs funds.
5. Time-to-market is critical since lifecycle of apps is short. Also need to constantly think of improving the app. Developers & operators do not need to worry about micro-billing & micro-promotions since network-side platform provide those features.
6. UI and UX are the two main factors of apps to create user ‘stickiness’. Arvind indicated the Phone Back-up product for cumbersome UI.
7. User roles, identity & profiles is also important.
8. ‘AppStore model’ has created a level-playing fields for developers. But whether we need to share revenue with operators even for apps which require the network only for download is to be questioned!
9. Which kind of applications? Amit Mehta of TCS talked about ABCD – Astrology, Bollywood, Cricket & Devotional. LBS applications still hold some promise. Whether video-based apps hold any promise was a question from audience but it requires 2.5/3G  adoption which has not got much usage in India yet!
10. Last but not least – give ESOPs to make the whole team part of the company growth.

Of course, there was a separate panel discussion on LBS – Navteq, Interchain Solutions, Satnav & mapmyindia executives. I was interested in LBS based apps for Elderly Caredomain back in my days at Inst. for Infocomm Research (I2R) in 2002.  BUT security & privacy are THE MOST important issues still to be addressed, this WIRED magazine article is an interesting read – covers both the good & the bad sides of LBS & also some incomplete solutions!!!

A.P.J.Abdul Kalam on Leadership

A few days back I had a post on C.K.Prahalad’s views on Leadership. A few days back I read a article in the local India edition of Entrepreneur about Abdul Kalam’s views on a Leader, which are the following (extracted from here):

1. Leader must have a vision.
2. Leader must have a passion to transform the vision into action.

The above two are same as knowing where to go & not lose the sheep. Of course, the execution part is equally important & difficult as the vision part.

3. Leader must be able to travel into an unexplored path.
4. Leader must have courage to take decisions.

The above two are related, one needs to be courageous esp. when treading unchartered territory.

5. Leader must know how to manage success and failure.

Example that was quoted for this quality was: to take self-responsibility in the event of a failure and also to praise others for success and not oneself. I guess this comes from ones humility – same as follow and not be ahead sheep-dog rule.

6. Leader should have Nobility in management.

Noble meaning generous or magnanimous.

7. Every action of the leader should be transparent.
8. Leader must work with integrity and succeed with integrity.

The above two are related, we know what happened to Satyam Computers – mainly because of not doing these two.

Universal Charging Solution for Mobile – At Last!!!

Snap of the different types of mobile phone adapters that are there with me:

Mobile Phone Adapters Zoo

One can see the different types of the – in shapes, sizes and weights – on both ends. Not only that, the recent one pump in more current to charge faster. These are not the only ones I have, but there are a few more which I didn’t include. Not all of them are mine, some are left by the guests who came to my house !!! I am not sure what to do with all these. These will be thing of the past because of the GSM UCS standard to which many operators and manufacturers have committed themselves:

“The group has set an ambitious target that by 2012 a universal charging solution (UCS) will be widely available in the market worldwide and will use Micro-USB as the common universal charging interface. The group agreed that by the 1^st January 2012, the majority of all new mobile phone models available will support a universal charging connector and the majority of chargers shipped will meet the high efficiency targets set out by the OMTP (Open Mobile Terminal Platform), the industry body who developed the technical requirements behind UCS.”

But we have wait until 2012 for this! May be we will have solar cells packed in the display itself by that time !!

C.K.Prahalad on Leadership Styles

Today I got some time to look at C.K.Prahalad’s views on Leadership, since I have been wanting to read about his ideas on FBoP. But listening & viewing him was much more interesting! Leadership is about hope, change & future. Always analogies help people to understand better and he likens a leader to a sheepdog. The following are the three important points he mentions:

• Bark & not bite: Consensus building and listening to dissent & being open to new ideas which are different & valuable. Listening to customer voices for co-creation.
• Follow and not be ahead: Leading from behind with humility and not be arrogant.
• Knowing where to go & not lose the sheep: Should have a point-of-view about the future and be able to articulate it.

Leaders of future should have moral authority & not hierarchical authority: Gandhi Vs General George Patten styles. Gandhi was never dogmatic, autocratic but willing to changing his views. To him, means are as imp. as ends or goals and had clear values. But Patten used hierarchical leadership as a way of demonstrating credibility.

Some LinkedIn Peeves

Here are some of my peeves about LinkedIn from what I have tried in the last few days.

1. They allow only 160 chars in the invite mesage, so I am forced to invent my own short forms:  for e.g.,LUT-on-OFW for Let’s Talk on One of Week-ends.
2. No URLs in invite messages, I wonder what resembles like a URL in following text: “Since now I have time,shall we start on a book writing project? I thought you had some topics in your mind.LUT-on-OOW.”

I tried the MS-Outlook export as CSV & import into Outlook, no problem with that! I can rest assured that I have my LinkedIn contacts on my netbook also !!

yUML – Diagramming with a Difference

I found the yUML online diagramming service while browsing the Atlassian Confluence Blogs.
Unlike the pioneer of diagramming web service providers such as Gliffy, yUML processes the diagram input as part of the URL itself and returns an image file.  I am not sure how many are going to like this given that the URL can become pretty long for large diagrams for which this service is not meant for I guess. Though making it as part of URL avoids having any kind of back-end database, it becomes cumbersome. They also have a stand-alone install to be used within firewalled intranet.

The name yUML confused me initially since it sounds similar to the yWorks Diagramming Tools vendor and it thought it is using their diagram layout engine inside. But I found out that it is using the open source Graphviz instead. The Graphviz syntax has too many graph, node and edge attributes to remember which is hidden to a large extent by the more intuitive yUML syntax. But one disadvantage of that is the lack of flexibility provided by the Graphviz options which is visible in the sample Wiki Conceptual Graph I generated below. It remains to be seen how well one can strike a trade-off between the two extremes given that one is diagramming in a specific context – examples: UML diagrams, Network Diagrams, Organization Charts, Business Process Flows, etc. One should be able to define a DSL for each of these ‘domains’ (or contexts) and hide the nitty-gritty of graphviz node, edge & graph attributes behind the DSL translation.

The PDF does not come out well though, they still have certain things to iron out since it is still in beta version. But I strongly advise that the creators of this tool change the name to something else, to avoid the confusion with yWorks products.

PS:
I am not sure where the DSL of yUML is documented – may be not much to document, but here is one more (at least that I know of) textual UML notation in TextUML which is more verbose compared to yUML’s DSL.

First Opinions on Bintro Match-making Service

I stumbled across Bintro while browsing the NY Semantic Web Meetup Community, looks like an activity community of 800-odd people. I joined Bintro today since I feel that there are opportunities in improved ‘match-making’ especially in the area job search and fulfillment. If anybody comes with a really good algorithm for ‘Match-making Engine’ using semantic web & other technologies, it has even potential to be even deployed within the firewall!

While signing up for the service, I felt that it is a bit of short-coming to allow only letters & comma in the expertise field. Otherwise it throws error: “Expertise can only contain letters and commas” but there are technology key-words which has numbers: web2.0, 2.5G mobile, 3G mobile, etc. Actually it turns out that expertise is a comma separated list of skills which gets copied to skills field in the user profile.

I wish there is support for importing linkedIn profile which I have been using for a few years now but at least there is import option from FaceBook. I tried this but it does not seem to work for me at least! So, I had to copy-paste from my profile multiple times each of the different fields. Once you setup a rich-enough profile, you can ‘compose a broadcast’ which specifies the details of your need/provision.

What Bintro’s  match-making engine (claimed to be their USP) does, is match the demand with supply. I am not sure if it integrates data from other sites, for e.g. Moster job site, but until they do that, I am not sure what value-add they can do for people who register in their site!!!

India Elections in Summer – Anywhere Voting

It is unfortunate that General Elections in India are held this time in summer, since many people are likely to be traveling on vacations to coincide with the school summer holidays. I know that there is an option to go to Indian Embassy in the specific country to cast your vote but unfortunately there is no such option if you are traveling within the country. I guess the main problem to solve is to get a list of people who are traveling to places where they will be instead of the place where they are supposed to vote, setting up – may be just one – voting center in each of the 1st,2nd & 3rd tier cities and sending the people list to each of those voting centers. Getting the list through an internet web site or thru’ SMS should not be a problem but the main logistical issue is setting up these voting centers in the same day when they are supposed to vote in their residential place. Also we can not cover every small village in the country. Of course people who will be on the train on the day of voting will miss out but that is very very small percentage. This looks like something which is worth trying if this happens in future but I am not what percentage of people really missed out on voting due to travel, considering the paltry voter turn-out in this election. I am not sure how other countries handle such a situation, may be we can learn from them as well.

Asus P320 Smart-Phone Review

After a long study & review of the feature available in WLAN enabled phones which works for fring service, I decided on buying one of Nokia N81 (even though it came in 2007 itself, my bidget was only Rs.14k max.) or Asus P320. I decided on Asus, not that it is using Windows Mobile 6.1 (exploring & learning that is one of my goals for this year), but it has better features compared to the price – I bought it for only Rs.10k in Hindu Online Shopping, without any microSD card or Bluetooth headset.

Anyways, after fiddling with it in the last 24-hours, I should say that I don’t have much regrets buying this reasonably designed, light smarty! The first thing I tried was to install fring client and try out the gtalk VoIP call over the home WLAN and fortunately one of my colleagues was still hanging out late night on gtalk. I was eager to check the voice quality over fring but to my disappointment, it was no where near the quality one would get using gtalk on your laptop over WLAN!

In general, the phone is low on the processor speed to run Windows Mobile and just two of the communications interfaces (WLAN & GSM) at the same time. The UI responses are slow and sometimes makes one impatient. IE Mobile was not responding once for me and I had to restart the phone. I should opera on this and see how it works. But I have been viewing youtube videos and reading news in the RSS reader and it has been working well so far. Yet to see how long the battery lasts while browsing thru’ WiFi alone!