Friday, October 10, 2008

Financial crisis moving to Asian shores??

Today's FT has a writeup called "Japanese insurer Yamato Life collapses"

Yamato is a medium sized insurance company has filed for bankruptcy with debts of over $2bn! FT writes
"Yamato Life failed largely because of its problematic investments in securitisation products"
Well now we know US been very gracious not just in helping Asian countries with its dollars but also with its subprime risks. Not just the Japan, there were rumours and even speculation that the ICICI bank of would also buckle under. All dismissed as rumours of course by the Bank.

For a while, with the bullish run, the peanuts that I earn was invested 'strong' stocks; I even diversified and kept a little in mutual funds. Both tumbled, fell, went, vanished. Can I leave leave them in the bank? Or do I need to stash them under my pillow? Sooner than later I believe the government in India would also guarantee the investments. Fingers crossed.

Last thought: if there is no where to 'invest' why don't we just spend? Or are we concerned with saving up all for a rainy day?

Save the cheerleader, save the world :)

Thursday, October 09, 2008

Beer is the Solution!

Who said alcoholism is bad? Here's the latest joke straight out of yesterday's ET.
The effectiveness of investing money in beer vs stocks of financial service companies in the US.
If you had purchased $1000 of AIG stock an year ago, you would have $42 left.
With Lehman, you would have $6.60 left.
With Fannie or Freddie less than $5 left.
But if you had purchased $1000 worth of beer an year ago, drank all of it, then turned in the cans for the aluminium recycling refund, you would have had $214.
Who would've guessed! Well Homer (the Simpson of course) knew it all along ;)So cheers to Homer. Hic!

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Mail Goggles: Google Mamma Watching

This is a brilliant one! I'll quote directly from the Gmail Blog
"Sometimes I send messages I shouldn't send. Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together. Gmail can't always prevent you from sending messages you might later regret, but today we're launching a new Labs feature I wrote called Mail Goggles which may help." Check out the Blog here.
How it works is by asking you a few arithmetic questions. See the screenshot below.


The default setting is to activate Mail Goggles on weekends and that too late night. Quite imaginative. And I'm pleasantly surprised such a simple idea has been taken up by and put into an application millions of people use!

Can't deny that I haven't had the urge to send out quite a few email under the influence of herbal products. What next Google? Decide when the best time would be to send the email? Gimmie a break! Link to my earlier post: Technology & Me

Career Growth?!

Second time I received this forward. Yea sure it's funny as a cartoon, definitely not when you see it in the mirror.
Curious thought: is it just the IT industry? Or is it just the beer? Or is it just that we don't have time for anything else in life outside work? Or is it that we tend to eat everything since we can 'afford' it? And why just guys?

PS: Just for the record, I think the picture is completely wrong, it's showing too much experience (far too much) than I actually have :)

Sunday, October 05, 2008

Sigh!

Check grammar, spelling and everything else!

Mashups - An overview

This post came about after a little chat I had with my boss on a 'thought leadership' paper submission. His thought was on a way in which enterprises (say power companies) can talk to each other over the Internet. As he was explaining, here's how my mind went: "Hmm standards, eh? Services on the Internet. SOA. Hmm why not have a website where the customer can pick and choose the company and why just electricity? Water too. Let's put together a map to find out the nearest office, and comments and maybe even YouTube videos. Yes YouTube. Spiderpig was hilarious. Should download the Simpsons. Sorry what were you saying?"

So here I was wondering about mashups and I still don't have a clue what to write for the paper. Anyway thought I'd post an overview of mashups before the Kronenberg kicks in.

Lets start with examples, shall we?

Example 1
Consider the PC. We have many applications that we use everyday like Word, Firefox and Winamp. Now spare a moment on the picture below. So at the bottom we have Windows as the OS and all these apps run 'on-top'. But we can obviously use other alternatives like Abiword, IE & foobar. Double click and voila! The seamless operation is because Windows provides something called APIs or Application Programming Interfaces. Interfaces are exactly what they - application use these are well defined requests to query information such as Date/Time, access to the graphics display, or even authenticating the user. Windows recognises the request, does the necessary work and provides the information.

The steps would be something like this
* App: Hey Windows what time is it? (of course it's all in some computer language;)
* Windows: I undesrtand your request. Let me check the system clock.
* Windows: The time is 12:00 pm

Now thanks to APIs, all applications have a consistent way of working with Windows ie. even when new versions of Windows is released or even if it's an Intel or an AMD processor or even if you have an NVIDIA or an ATI.

Now lets extend the concept to the Internet.
Example 2
For this example I'm taking my all time favourite company: Goggle :) We've all come across websites (apart from Google, of course!) that have a little search box that actually uses Google to search the website. And the recent one is where there is a bigger box with a map showing locations. Check out this cool website. http://todaysstory.googlepages.com/tokyo.htm

All this is possible because Google 'publishes' APIs that websites can use. Now the important thing to note here is that these websites do not hold Google code to do the search, rather they query Google. A more geeky way to describe this would be 'the website consumes services that have been published by Google'.

Finally Mashups
All this is fine, so what are mashups? Ah well lets extend example 2 further. Consider the picture below.

Now Google is not the only company that provides services, Yahoo! for example provides a lot of financial information. Now how about if there was a website that provides financial information for say, Nike and at the same time gave you an option to buy at eBay and also shows you the nearest store. Hows that for interesting! Well folks this is what a mashup is.

Quite simple if you think about it, bring in data and services from many places put them at one accessible place. Of course you can't just bring in anything and everything: the data & services need to be capable of understand user requests or in geek speak should be 'mashable'. The concept is nothing new, but i guess the tipping point was when Google launched it's Google Maps API (2006 I'm guessing, so you see mashups are not ver new!).

Mashups thus bring with them two very important things: standardisation and more importantly innovation.

Business/Enterprise Mashups
For businesses, mashups can be essential tools to reach out to the customer. An ecosystem ahs already developed companies offering mashable content, companies offering tools to mash content and even companies that offer ideas of how to mash them together!

Now lets take a peek inside the enterprise. IT has been focused on providing infrastructure, and usually has not been able to deliver what users want! Imagine a scenario where end users can actually create applications that take consume data from various application sources and create a soluions without asking too many people. This is business intelligence, this is self service IT, this is what enterprise mashups provide.

Enterprises no longer need to spend huge efforts in building applications that span the organisation. No more suite of products. Consider Acme Inc that has it's field force automation happening on SFDC, the HR running Peoplesoft and trouble ticketing on AmdocsCRM (my favourite!). A mashup can easily drive up productivity (and also drive down costs) by linking all three together.

Standards for data and interfaces are thus very very important. Enter SOA. I'll talk about that in another post.

Well my friends I hope that provided a quick overview of mashups. Time for me to hit the sack.