Posts

Sydney in race to develop first bionic eye

Bionic eye is very close to my heart. I would definitely love to see something in this space. In future I also intend to set up a wiki/website where I will try to put as much information about where people can learn about the developments in this space. More on the developments here [Via Slattery Watch] A Centre for Implantable Bionics is to be established at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and one its first aims is to commercialise a functioning bionic eye. UNSW's Advanced Vision Prosthesis Group has been working on a bionic eye since 1997, and has produced over 70 peer-reviewed scientific publications and filed multiple patents. Other research efforts of the Centre will include trefined bionic hearing devices and artificial heart technologies, and development of electronic stimulation technology. A new leading research chair, the Paul M Trainor Chair in Biomedical Engineering, will be affiliated with the centre and an international search is currently underway for t

Report - Sensis and the Australian Search and Directories Market

I have undertaken this report to explore, learn and analyse the local online search and directories market to understand the developments that are taking place in this area. More than 18 players, from small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to large corporations trying to get some share of this market. The main focus of this report is on Sensis and its competitors and how it can reinvent itself in a rapidly changing local market. I would like to thank Mark Rimmer from Rave About It and Meg Tsiamis from dLook for providing a lot of invaluable information, insights and help while preparing this report. Read it here or download it from here .

Top 4 Probable Digg Buyers

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Rumours are hot again about Google/Microsoft planning to buy Digg. When I wrote about Top5 probable Digg buyers in 2006 it was a rumor, but this time reports coming out suggest that this time Kevin Rose might sell it, esp when the stock market is going down and the US is technically in recession. The only difference between now and then is, that one of the suggested 5 players, Yahoo itself is in trouble. So only 4 players remain in the race and these are : 1. News Corp 2. Time Warner 3. Microsoft 4. Google I'm quoting from my previous post here with some modifications on why these 4 players are after Digg: News Corporation - Newscorp would love to have this esp; after their acquisition myspace has lost traffic/users and momentum to Facebook. And as a media company it makes sense to have the most popular portal for news/technology/current affairs to be in their armour. Microsoft - Microsoft will be the obvious choice because Microsoft is lagging in this Web 2.0 phenomenon. Ther

Agile Consulting to Product Offerings - ThoughtWorks has come a long way

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ThoughtWorks has come a long way from being an Agile practising and consulting company to a product offerings company. Founded by Neville Roy Singham, as a Management Consulting Firm under the name of Singham Business Services in 1992, it relaunched itself as ThoughtWorks after three years of its inception to focus on building software. ThoughtWorks is now a leading global company when it comes to Agile Development and Practices. It is helping businesses across the globe with their consulting practices which include, Agile coaching and mentoring, S/W Development and Delivery and now products suite under the initiative of Thougtworks Studio People who are in consulting business can learn few things from them: 1. Be Agile to market forces, prefer people to process. 2. Strategic Resourcing and Innovation - it follows a different model for hiring its workforce, people who already have a good profile in an open-source project are most likely to be hired and will be allowed to contin

Catchup at Cebit

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I will be heading to Sydney on May 22 to attend CeBIT's Transaction 2.0 conference. For those who are interested in catching up with me, please feel free to come and chat with me. Our Australian Startups Carnival 2008 winner Scouta has got a pod for exhibition in TechRamp Pavilion , so will be there for some time as well. It's going to be exciting and a little bit hectic, but it's worth it. I'm looking forward to catching up with new friends.

My Thoughts on HP + EDS Acquisition

I have penned down my thoughts on the recent acquisition of EDS by HP, which is about 3 C’s - Consulting, Cloud and computing. Read it here .

Microblogging with Twitter

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Guest Post Written by Ujjwal Grower and edited by Vishal Vishal's intro: Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service , instant messaging , email , or an application such as Twitterrific . Twitter was founded in March 2006 by San Francisco start-up company Obvious Corp. The restriction to 140 characters has resulted in Twitter being labelled as “micro-blogging”. A traditional blog is a log of what somebody is up to but in a richer, more detailed format. One of the key aspects of Twitter is to send and receive updates (also called tweets) via your browser, email, instant messaging clients and SMS so you can keep in touch no matter where you are . How it works : When you send in a mobile text (SMS), Twitter sends it out to your group of friends and posts it to your Twitter page. Your friends might not have phone alerts turned on so t

Unholy alliance - Microsoft, Novell partnership

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Microsoft has announced its partnership with Novell to put Suse Linux (2nd no Linux distro) on a Windows desktop. As part of the deal, Microsoft will offer sales support for Suse Linux and also co-develop technologies with Novell to make it easier for users to run both Suse Linux and Microsoft Windows on their computers. Microsoft plans to distribute 70,000 coupons for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server maintenance and support to customers that want to run both Windows and Linux in their environments. In addition to this, Novell and Microsoft will work together to improve interoperability between Windows and Novell's SuSE Linux. Some insights from infoworld why this partnership has come along: Scenario one: Looking to the future and seeing the proverbial handwriting on the wall, stops the bleeding of Windows to Linux desktops. Scenario two: Did the desktop OEMs push Microsoft toward this deal? More of their customers want Linux and so the PC manufacturers want this technology

Take2 -Top Web2.0 Apps in Australia

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I recently wrote about upcoming Web 2.0 apps in Australia and it was received well. As a result of that i have now updated this list in collaboration with Richard Macmanus from Web 2.0 workgroup . More here , here and here .

Top 5 Probable Digg Buyers

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Rumours are hot about News Corp planning to buy Digg . It’s a rumour right now, how much truth is there, is anybody's guess. This can be real news and might have been leaked to the press as a part of the strategy as suggested by Internet Analyst, Henry Blodget, Settle on basic deal terms and a provisional price, leak details so the market has a couple of days to chew on the idea, see how the stock reacts, and neutralize the market’s biggest concern (lawsuits) by announcing a distribution pact with the main guy who might sue you, fix the price, rubber-stamp the press release, and go. The coming days will tell us how much truth is there. If News Corp cannot buy this then these might be probable buyers for Digg. Microsoft - Microsoft will be the obvious choice because Microsoft is lagging in this Web 2.0 phenomenon. There hasn't been any decent/buzzing service offered by Microsoft in this space. If this comes on board, it will provide them with a kick-start, which they are hopin

Top Web 2.0 Apps in Australia

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Every day we read/hear about the new web 2.0 applications that start up with interesting concepts used. The recent acquisition of YouTube by Google has raised hope for new startups to realize their dream of making it big time. Aussies are not behind in this trend. There are quite a few interesting applications that have come out of hibernation. To-do list - Remember the Milk It allows users to manage tasks online as any to-do list will do. It is integrated with Google Maps, and Skype (IM) and is available on Mobiles as well. This is a very popular application around the globe with more than 100,000 users from 155 countries. It was launched in October 2005. Digg clone for funniest email - FWDitOn This is inspired by digg . It allows users to read hilarious emails, do a rating and share it with others. It is an interesting concept and has caught the attention of a few Venture Capitalists from overseas. This site was covered recently on TechCrunch . Community for parents -

IBM acquires Datapower - Will software be same

IBM has acquired Datapower , one of the non (web 2.0) companies in the overly hyped environment. And it seems it hasn't got any coverage in the main media yet, but might get in the coming days. Currently, everyone seems to be focused on Web 2.0, but it looks like this acquisition might have long-term effects on software (S/W) applications. The question is what exactly Datapower do and how IBM's acquisition is significant? Today, S/W applications are built on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Legacy applications are enhanced to have SOA-based infrastructure. What it means to the layman, is that there is a service available on some website like (Google, or Amazon) and you can send a request for that service, and it replies to you back with the desired answer. SOA based applications mainly have data sent over the wire as XML, it can be SOAP (XML/HTTP) or XML/JMS. In a broader sense, it's a message (containing XML data on some transport protocol) that is sent across the wi

Books Worth a Look

The Financial Times and Goldman Sachs have announced the finalists in this year's Book of the Year Award , which include: John Battelle, The Search Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics Constantinos C. Markides and Paul A. Geroski, Fast Second Pietra Rivoli, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy James B. Stewart, Disneywar

Infosys - What Dell did to the PC industry

After finishing writing my blog on Google vs Microsoft I bumped onto this post on Wired.com which has published this article on top 40 technology based business in leading innovations... and surprisingly they had Infosys . I know about Infosys for two reasons, a) They are one of our competitors in Australia and putting too much pressure on us as our jobs are under threat b) Second reason is I was born and brought up in India, So I know that, as I have grown up seeing this as the leading and one of the best companies to work for in India at least. According to this article Infosys is going to be Dell in consulting business what Dell is in PC industry today. Some thoughtful thinking for the likes of IBM, Accenture and EDS.