when technology is a part of the whole!

The room is full! Get us some more chairs.. that is how the blogging workshop at IHC Delhi began. We started with expecting 60 people to attend and ended with around 200 instead! The interest in blogging is clearly increasing day by day.. The workshop was organised by IBNMS in collaboration with their Delhi Chapter – www.delhibloggers.in .. The session started with Ajay talking about the society and how is it helping people adopt to blogging. The keynote speaker for the workshop was Mr. Madhavan from Hindustan Times who shared his views on why and how of blogging. He started by contrasting the organised march of the mainstream media to the blogs that are unruly in nature..  sort of army discipline versus civilian anarchy! his advice to the blogging rookies was to clearly define the objective they want to achieve via their blogs. The objective can be reached by providing content with a personality of the author. Learning the tools for blogging shouldn’t be an end in itself a...

DISCLAIMER: This isn’t a technical post but a personal one. The occasion warrants it! I haven’t being writing a lot of blog posts lately. Simply ‘cause I am now a father! I see this as a promotion that God has made for me to make me a better person.. The little boy was born on June 6th in Gurgaon. And ever since that day I have been learning a new trick everyday. Few of my blogger friends got innovative and gifted the little one a new domain name – www.juniorkant.com .. thanks amit, ashish and abby . And we haven’t named him yet! The astrologer says that his name should begin with “H” and so the hunt for a name is on. If you really ask me I am waiting for an inspiration to help me choose a name. Do you have a suggestion? I am going to get regular with my blogging from now on. So stay tuned for more of what this blog is all about microsoft technologies in india…

Silverlight 2 BETA 2 will be releasing later in this week. Silverlight 2 improved over Silverlight 1 by incorporating .NET CLR in it thereby immensely improving the usefulness.. The BETA 2 now takes Silverlight 2 to “ Enterprise Ready ” status with a commercial go-live license available… Some improvements included in BETA 2 are: New and improved controls (over 40 new controls - button, check box, date controls, gridview, layout, TabControl, text wrapping and scrollbars for TextBox, and for DataGrid additions include Autosize, Reorder, Sort) Networking improvements (cross-domain networking support for calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS, and standard HTTP services, upload support for WebClient, and duplex communications) Data handling Improvements (can now provide one way or two way databinding to any number of data sources including LINQ) Improvements in error handling, reporting and development experience Updates to Deep Zoom and animation  (XML-based file for...

Microsoft has seemingly launched a new site - http://taskmarket.com/ that is meant as an exchange for freelancers and experts. It is in the lines of international sites like elance.com , getafreelancer.com , guru.com and limeexchange.com At the site, you are required to register with a unique username and provide your paypal ID. The site offers the options to:   Post a Job   Search for Jobs   Subscribe to e-mail alerts to be notified when jobs you are interested in are posted Fill out your profile page The site is very new (most of the jobs posted had the date for 3 June i.e. TODAY).. by industry sources this market may be as large as $10 mn by 2010. This is especially relevant to India as most of the technical jobs are done here. The no. of freelancers are only set to explode in the coming days! Technorati tags: microsoft , taskmarket , freelancers

These are my notes from an internet marketing seminar I attended. Read through to see if you can figure out who delivered this and i promise you would be surprised :) Topic: Web & New Media: Emerging Trends 183 bn emails sent a day 49 mn internet users in India 7.5 hrs spent on internet/ week (18-35 Males) 1.2 bn searches / month- search increasing at 80% 80% online shop Online Time Spent in India: 23% – TV 30% Internet 26% Print 21 % Radio Advertising Money Spent: 41% TV 1% Internet 40% Print 12% Radio 1.4 bn online out of 6.6 bn in the world mobile is the next huge thing... computing cloud is the current stage after PC being personal era.. web is not US centric.. 211 still the largest.. inspite of the company being so "open source".. the presentation consistently says Confidential & PROPRIETARY .. paradoxical.. the presentation laptop from google is running Windows XP.. sweet.. and oh! the presenta...

Twitter was down for few days. The micro-blogging soothsayers had nowhere else to go but wait for the service to come back online. However, twitter is simply a service (and prone to failures).. for now, inspite of the numerous times it keeps throwing the cute error messages, people are willing to forgive the outages. my observation to this episode is if the whole “micro-blogging” ecosystem could go down based on a service, aren’t we putting all our eggs in one basket? if micro-blogging has to go main stream, can one only rely on a single service to deliver the same? Where are the alternatives? oh yeah, u might start thinking of 3jam, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Jooopz, Jyngle, Loopnote, tumblr, plazes, Pinger, pownce and Swarm-it but none really have achieved the status or ubiquity that twitter has.. the other reason why this is more important for social media is that all of these services are online. and online services are prone to disruption more than any other thing (self inflicted or ma...

One of the most important products of the Microsoft Office suite is Outlook 2007. This email software is basically an email management software but can also act as calendaring software, task, note taking software, contacts manager or conversation tracking software! And in case you want to buy one in India, it isn’t exactly a simple thing as i realised when one of MVPs asked me that question. It goes that the cheapest option to buy Office 2007 in India is the Office 2007 Home and Student Edition that costs INR 5039/-. But that doesn’t come with Outlook 2007! The next option is to buy an Office Small Business edition that costs INR 15,990… You can explore these buy options from the Original MS online store . But the MVP mentioned that he wanted to be able to buy Outlook 2007 only. However, there is no option of buying a retail Outlook 2007 box from the online store! The next simple way would be to buy it from “Dial a Software” partner. However, you can get this in few cities in Indi...