when technology is a part of the whole!

“Microsoft community drives Microsoft products” – a statement that would make you roll with laughter, isn’t it? it did for me too till i attended the User Group Leads meet organised by Microsoft. it is here that i witnessed the seriousness with which the user group community goes about its job (i had earlier tweeted about this). User Groups is the life blood of the Microsoft communities (other community avenues include blogs, forums, webcasts and events) in India…  there are more than 40,000 known users spread across India in numerous professional user groups in various cities (there are another equal nos. in student user groups)… the bangalore user group can alone boast of more than 10,000 users (truly amazing)..  with more than 71 user group sessions in the last year alone, u can’t be far away from one happening in any large city of the country. The user group leads were a very attentive and enthusiastic bunch who met the MS folks with great deal of passion and feedback. the

Live Mesh technical preview has expanded to include Canada, India and Ireland (English only). So what is Live Mesh you might wonder? Live Mesh is supposed to be a platform on which anyone would be able to build applications using the basic services of synchronization across the devices done over internet. Mesh, true to its name, will enable users to reach their information and applications irrespective of the machine they are currently working on (think entire Office running on any computer you log on without having to install app on every machine)… As of today, Live Mesh team has made only some of these experiences available. These experiences are: Files that automatically get syncronised on all the machines that run this program (sort of Foldershare) Online file storage (sort of Skydrive) Online group collaboration (sort of Groove ) Remote Desktop Viewing (sort of SharedView) The cool thing here is the seamless implementation of Software + Services. The clou

Congratulations Countrymen! May peace and sense prevail..

Software piracy is bane to all the software developers in the country and ultimately hurts the reputation of the country on the world stage. in order to establish ourselves as respected, India needs to tighten its laws & enforcement against software piracy. I have always believed that any law enforcement has to be done on a citizen - govt. partnership (see my trafficviolators.com initiative).. A citizen plays an equally important part in this education and enforcement. Microsoft has now enabled people to report its software piracy. If you are in India and observe any software piracy of Microsoft software  you have the option of reporting the same in the following ways: Method 1: E-mail piracy@microsoft.com . Method 2: Call the Microsoft Hotline  at 1800-111100  (from MTNL & BSNL landline) or 1800-1021100 (from Mobile and  Airtel)  Method 3: Fill out an online reporting form . More details are available here: https://www.microsoft.com/resources/howtotell/report

This post is thanks to the meeting with an iphone enthusiast over the weekend. Now this iphone enthusiast isn’t from India and has been using an iphone for some time alongwith his Mac. While checking out the cool interface of the iphone we casually started to compare the features of his iphone with the HTC Windows Mobile we were carrying. this is more relevant as airtel and vodaphone are planning to come out with iphone 3G soon in India (for airtel the launch is fixed on Aug 22nd)… while the pricing is not yet disclosed, i would assume that they may cost around 30K in India. and the irony is that in India there isn’t a single 3g network and the ones most likely to get are the govt. carriers like BSNL :) What follows below are some discoveries we made in that friendly comparison: iphone has cooler interface than Windows Mobile. Agree. One of us has tried to include a iphone shell (iPhonz) on Win Mobile but the quality of that shell was really bad and the phone had to be rebooted.. i

Blogging is easy – blogging right is difficult! A little help is always useful if you are planning to blog right.. The book “ Blogger – Beyond the Basics ” by Lee Jordan proved to be my bridge from blogging to blogging brilliantly .. The book is for users who have just entered the blogging field and would like to create a name for themselves in the blogosphere. The book quickly ramps you up from beginner to an advanced level user with ability to derive maximum out of your blog. This book is for those who want to use Google’s Blogging platform – Blogger . However, many tips in the book go beyond blogger and are generally useful for anyone. This is the first book that i have found in the market that covers blogging. Frankly I have also thought about writing a book on blogging but never went beyond the initial TOC. The key to blogging (as you may have heard) is content . Without appealing content, a blog will not get readers. This book is about getting the platform right so that

Recently, Microsoft India lost its General Manager – Neelam Dhawan to HP. Now Microsoft India has found her successor in Rajan Anandan from Dell India. Rajan was until recently VP and Country GM for Dell India (appointed on May 17, 2006).. Recently it was reported that he had returned to US .. A brief profile of Rajan is available at: http://www.indianangelnetwork.com/memberprofile.aspx?id=29 and is reproduced below: Rajan Anandan is an active angel investor in the US and in India. Rajan focuses on early stage investments in education, clean technology, internet, software and healthcare. Rajan has invested in several IAN companies including Authorgen, Druvaa, Eurekha and Viedea. Rajan's professional career has spanned across high technology and management consulting. Most recently Rajan was the Vice President and Country General Manager of Dell in India where he grew the Dell business from $250million to over $800 million and made Dell into the leading player among corpo

In this era, the importance of social media can’t be undermined. Forums are community avenues where people converge and discuss issues of relevance to them. Forums were preceded by BB software and newsgroups. India, however, jumped this technical cycle and moved directly to forums. The main advantage that forums presented to users was access using browser over internet and searchability. however, the drawback was that you have to be connected to internet to read the forums. Google acquired DejaNews that used to make newsgroup posts available over internet. There are a lot of forums in existence today and most likely you have been to one of them already. Microsoft for the first time has released a preview (CTP) of Offline Forum Reader for its MSDN/ TechNet Forums. This software is dependent on the APIs exposed by the forum and hence only works with the same. This combines the benefit that newsgroups provided of offline access with the traditional forum. Currently the beta s

Today I went to http://search.live.com (BTW, for all my non-technology searches I use Live Search) and was surprised by the new look of the site. This is however only implemented for US.. Take a look here: It has a pleasing picture on the main screen. Not only that, when you casually move around your mouse, it shows interesting tits bits of information about the picture… very very NICE! NOTE: if you want this look too, click on the country name located on the right top of the page and select US (English)..   I think Live Search does a MUCH better job of searching images and videos. And yeah, i have used the cashback feature (that let’s you get back money on every purchase online) of Live Search. It has saved me some money and would save you too if you intend to go shopping online. Compare this to the standard Google page: This is outrightly boring :(.. Google searches are good for technology searches.. but in the rest (esp rich media), google lags behind!