Sivaraman's Column-5: "Picasa Web Albums'

Hello, Good Morning! It has been decided now that this will be a weekly column. Okay? Today I am dealing with Picasa Web Albums. Some of you may already know and may have used it. It is for those who are new to Picasa.

First of all, what is Picasa Web Albums?

Picasa Web Albums is one of the services from the Google family and is designed to help users post and share their photos quickly and easily on the web.

It is available to anyone and offers the following:

1GB of free storage space to post and share approximately 4,000 photos, with the option to upgrade to more space

High-quality photos, automatically resized and optimized to fill available screen space
End-to-end photo management that makes it easy to download uploaded photos back to your computer

To sign up for your own Web Albums, please visit http://picasaweb.google.com/
1. Sign up with your google account.
2. Accept the agreement.
3. You can upload photos in two ways.

Direct upload
Click the upload button provided in your picasa photo page.
Give album title, date, description about the image, place taken and select public or unlisted. If public any one views the image. If you choose unlisted people invited by you only view it.

You can upload five pictures at a time. After selecting the pictures click the start upload button.
Create more new albums by clicking the ‘New Album’ Button.

Using Picasa software
You can use picasa software when you install and open picasa software it searches for pictures in your system and displays pictures as organised. You click any picture and click web album button

It will ask you to enter your username and password of web album account. Enter username and password and click the sign up button.

Give album title, date, description about the image, place taken and select public or unlisted.
You can click the view online button to view the albums when it completes uploading. You will be directly taken to your webalbum page.

4. The uploading is very very fast.
5. Single image upto 20 MB could be uploaded.
6. The quality of the picture is very good.
7. You can embed the slideshow in your blog or web page.
8. The users can view your public albums by visiting
http://picasaweb.google.com/your username

You can invite your friends and family members to visit your private albums by clicking the share album button. Enter the email id’s of your friends and then email albums to your friends.
You can also search for images from there.

See you next! Bye!

Computer World-3: Healthy Growth in the Sales of PCs, Notebooks and Servers

The sales of PCs, Notebooks and Servers show a healthy trend.

Overall Personal Computer (including Notebooks) sales register a 16% growth in 2007-08, touching 73.4 lakh units. Of this, desktop computers account for 55.22 lakh units. During this period, server sales touched 1.22 lakh units.

PC sales expected to touch 85 lakh units in 2008-09.

While the number of active Internet entities (including individual and business users) was 60 lakh subscriptions by March 2008 and 72 lakh by March 2008.

Based on “Notebooks drive personal computer sales” by Special Correspondent, The Hindu, Madurai, July 9, 2008.

Grateful thanks to the Special Correspondent and The Hindu.

Computer World-2: Seven New Printers from Samsung

Samsung has identified its printer business as one of its “key growth engines” in 2008. The company has launched seven new printer models, including the Laser Printer-ML 2245, which has been specifically developed for the Indian market.

Courtesy: The Hindu, Madurai, July 9, 2008 (‘Snapshots’)

For an article on ‘Samsung Electronics’ from Wikipeida:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Electronics

Homepage of ‘Samsung Electronics’:
http://www.samsung.com/in/

Grateful thanks to The Hindu, Samsung Electronics and Wikipedia.

Computer World-1: AMD's 'Teraflop' Graphics Cards

US-based chip maker AMD unveiled new graphics cards under its ATI label that promise a quantum jump in the ability to process and render visual still and moving images by taking the underlying processing power to the teraflop region.

On Tuesday ((July 8, 2008), the company announced the availability in India of two graphics cards in the ATI Radeon 4800 series that claimed to achieve industry milestones that were thought to be a decade away.

In effect, the cards will enable content creators to marry the ultra realism of today’s digital cinema with the interactive sensory experience of cyber games.

While dramatically cutting the time to perform compute-intensive tasks like rendering, from 30 hours for each frame to a few thousandth of a second, the cards would help film-makers add hitherto unachievable levels of audience participation in new cinematic products.

Vishal Goel, CEO of IndiaGames said , “This is a great boon for Bollywood… I am excited as a game developer at the opportunities for synergy between cinema and gaming that this opens”.

Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 would be available in India for about Rs.12,000 and Rs.16,000.

Excerpt from “AMD launches ‘teraflop’ graphics cards”
by Anand Parthasarathy, The Hindu, Madurai, July 9, 2008.
Grateful thanks to Mr Anand Parthasarathy and The Hindu.

Mobile World-8: "Apple's iPhone 3G"

About a fortnight back, when I saw a news item about Apple’s iPhone 3G, I visited their site to learn more about it. I recorded my interest there. Now they have sent me a mail informing that it will be in stores from Friday, the July 11, 2008 and asking me to be ready with everything I need. Well, definitely I would like to get one at the earliest opportunity and use it. At the appropriate time. The time is not ripe for that. There are so many issues standing in the way. Anyway, that side is personal. Now let me share some high-points of Apple’s iPhone 3G.

First of all, I presume all of you are familiar with Apple Inc. but for whom the PC would not have been born at all or at least would have very much delayed in making its appearance, several years to say the least. The two Steves, who started Apple, and the rest of the story, you might have known. If not, you can click and read the article from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computers

In iPhone 3G, 3G stands for third generation. What we have now is second generation mobiles.

Now to the interesting features of this new entrant (in their own words):

“iPhone makes it possible for the world’s best developers to create applications that are nothing short of amazing. Designed to leverage the groundbreaking technology in iPhone — like the Multi-Touch interface, the accelerometer, GPS, real-time 3D graphics, and 3D positional audio — these applications are unlike anything you’ve ever seen on a mobile phone.”

“iPhone 3G syncs with many applications on your Mac or PC. So if you organize your contacts, calendars, music, photos, and other information now, you'll be ready to sync when you get your iPhone home. Learn more.

Contacts and Calendars
iPhone syncs with iCal and Address Book or Entourage on a Mac, with Outlook on a PC, and with Yahoo! Address Book and Google Contacts on the web.

Email
iPhone works with the most popular email systems—including Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, AOL, and MobileMe. And iTunes syncs the settings from email accounts stored in Mail on a Mac or Outlook on a PC.

Photos
iPhone uses iTunes to sync photos from iPhoto on a Mac, or Adobe Photoshop Elements, Adobe Photoshop Album, or any picture folder on a PC.

Music and Video
If you don't have the latest version of iTunes, download it now and start a music and video library.

iTunes Account
If you don't have an iTunes Store account, set one up now by downloading iTunes, selecting the iTunes Store, and clicking the Sign In button in the upper-right corner.”

Want to try? Tell me after you buy one and use it about how it actually feels to possess such an advanced gadget. Thanks!

Sivaraman's Column-4: "Google Analytics"

Good Morning! Hope you had nice weekend. Now let me discus about Google Analytics. (A friend has asked me why you always write about Google technologies only. I am a great admirer of Google. Having started a Google topic, I thought I should cover at least some important technologies, before going to other topics. It is virtually impossible to cover all the Google topics. They are daily coming up with new items and to keep pace with them will be rather difficult. Okay!)

Google Analytics is yet another fascinating, free service from Google intended for bloggers, webmasters and online marketers. In short, if you are a blogger like me and want to know how many people visited your blog, where are they from, how much time they spend at your blog, what posting drew them to your blog or what interests them in your blog and such information you can easily get from Google Analytics.

1. Google Analytics has all the features one would expect from a high-end analytics offering. It also provides tightly integrated AdWords support, so one can view AdWords ROI metrics without having to import cost data or add keyword tracking codes.
2. Google Analytics is easy to use for novice marketers, while delivering all of the capabilities that experienced web analytics professionals expect.
3. It is a hosted service that runs on the same servers that power Google. From large, high-traffic corporate sites to small sites, Google Analytics delivers consistent service.
4. If you have an AdWords account, you can use Google Analytics directly from the AdWords interface. Google Analytics also calculates ROI metrics from automatically imported cost and keyword tracking data, saving you time.
5. It tracks all online campaigns, from emails to keywords, regardless of search engine or referral source.
6. Google takes the trust people place in them very seriously, and is pledged to safeguard the privacy of the user’s corporate data. Google understands well that web analytics data is sensitive information, so they accord ironclad protection it deserves.

How to Use Google Analytics:

1. Go to www.google.com/analytics.
2. Sign up with your gmail account. You will be taken to the secured page of Google Analytics.
3. Give your website/blog URL into Accounts Signup Page.
4. Also give your first name, last name, phone number and country and timezone.
5. Click continue button.
6. Read and Accept the Agreement.
7. Tracking code will be provided to you.
8. Copy and paste the tracking code into your website/blog.
9. Click the continue button.
10. You will be taken to Analytics Page.
11. In the homepage, you will be provided with the main details like:
(a) Site Usage: Visits; (ii) Page Views; (iii) AveragePages/Visits; (iv) Bounce rate; (v) Average Time spent at site; (vi) New visits.
(b) Visitors Overview : Number of Visitors
(c) Map Overlay: Countries of Visitors
(d) Traffic Sources: (i) Direct Traffic; (ii) Search Engine; (iii) Referring Site
In Visitors Menu, you can know the following details:
(a) How many people visited your site/blog
(b) How many visits each visitors makes
(c) The browser from which they are viewing
(d) Their Connection Speed
(e) Detailed Map of Countries/Visitors
(f) Time spent on site
(g) New visits
(h) How much time each visitor spends at your site/blog
(i) A comparison of Returning Visitors and New Visitors
(j) Language of visitors
(k) Visitors browser’s OS: Flash version/JavaSupport

In the Traffic Sources Menu, you find how the traffic comes to your site like (a) Percentage of Direct Traffic; (b) Percentage of Referring Sites; and (c) Percentage of Search Engines.

In the Content Menu, you can find out which of your pages are attracting most users. This will give you an idea of what the visitors like or want, which in turn helps the webmaster/blogger to pay more attention to such topics/type of presentations.
Google Analytics uses graphs, pie charts and geo maps to present data which makes it easier to understand and appreciate the data.

This is only a gist. For fully realizing the potential of Google Analytics, I suggest you personally visit it and see for yourself the various interesting features it presents. I might have some of the things that may of interest to you. I have given the URL above. That is all for today. See you tomorrow. Bye!

Dotcom World-7: "A Computer Edge for the Classroom Blackboard" by Sandeep Joshi

A Computer Edge for the Classroom Blackboard
Panaboard marries PC and Internet
by Sandeep Joshi

First there was the blackboard, used by generations of teachers for classroom instruction. Then came the whiteboard, which said goodbye to chalk and dust. Now it is ‘Internet inside’ as whiteboards become interactive, latching on to a PC and a Net connection.

Panasonic brought to India the “Panaboard”, an interactive whiteboard that allows direct display of the contents of a computer screen onto the board – actually6 a 77-inch-diagonal screen for high-impact presentations.

It enables users to run their own software applications for school lessons or even business presentations. Windows applications like PowerPoint and Excel, or educational software, can run on the Elite Panaboard. It also features book software to write or draw onto the screen, add notes, diagrams, text and images.

The Elite Panaboard comes with an electronic pen, which allows smooth mouse-like operations. The bundled Panaboard book application enables easy lesson preparation and contains Panasonic’s tools for creating and editing teaching materials.

Panasonic Asia Pacific’s Business Head Ajay Madan says: “It is a challenge in itself for any presenter to engage an audience. Elite Panaboard offers a helping hand to such users and provides them with a solution to enhance their presentations and make them more effective and engaging.”

The made-in Japan product is priced at Rs.1.35 lakh in India. It was developed and extensively tested with help from teachers in Australia.

Courtesy: The Hindu, Madurai, May 25, 2008 (Information Technology page).

Grateful thanks to Mr Sandeep Joshi and The Hindu.

Mobile World-7: "Desktop, Laptop, now Celltop!" by Anand Parthasarathy

Desktop, Laptop, now Celltop!
Aricent’s Indian engineers create widget-based content for mobile phones
by Anand Parthasarathy

When the desktop personal computer went portable and became a laptop, it reduced the size of the screen – but the websites one browsed on the Internet had the same look and feel, even when scaled down. Cellphones further shrunk the screen size, but now it was too small to display web pages in the same way. To get over the challenge, the widget or web gadget was born, a tiny program that ran one Web application at a time and displayed it to be readable on the average mobile phone.

Now India-based engineers of US-based Aricent, the world’s largest independent communications software developer, have taken the widget concept to its logical conclusion: “We give you the Celltop,” they say, “the cellphone version of the desktop.”

Aricent announced global availability of the Celltop, a suite of applications or cells, all latched to the Internet: one pushes continuous weather information for your town; another updates the prices of the stocks and shares you are interested in; a third sends you live cricket scores; a fourth consolidates the news in a way you want it: mixing global and national headlines with feeds from your home town.

Aricent president Sanjay Dhawan says the application works with both Java and Brew – the two programming environments that fuel the GSM and CDMA mobile phone. “The beauty is: the same cell can be displayed on a mobile phone, a TV screen, a PC or a notebook computer, as the users moves from home to office.”

The Celltop fundamentally changes the way mobile users can access Net-based services. Watch out for Indian mobile operators as they offer added value services based on the widget concept of the Aricent Celltop, ‘made in India’ for the world.

Courtesy: The Hindu, Madurai, May 25, 2008 (Information Technology page).

Grateful thanks to Mr Anand Parthasarathy and The Hindu.

Mobile World-6: "Cellular Services revenue to cross $37 billion"

The booming Indian cellular market will see its subscriber base exceeding 73.7 crore and its revenue crossing a huge $37 billion by 2012, making India the world’s second largest wireless market after China in terms of mobile connections, said leading global information technology research and advisory company, Gartner.

Gartner said that the Indian mobile market continued to be dominated by prepaid subscribers.

Prepaid connections accounted for more than 89% of all mobile connections in 2007 and are expected to grow to more than 92% by 2012.

According to Gartner, the industry will witness several changes in the coming year that could revolutionize the face of the telecom industry with the introduction of technologies such as WiMAX, 3G and mobile number portability (MNP).

India will move to its next phase of evolution with the commercial launch of WiMAX and 3G in 2009.

Excerpt from The Hindu, Madurai, July 3, 2008 (“Cellular Services revenue to cross $37 b - Special Correspondent)
Grateful thanks to The Hindu.

Sivaraman's Column-3: "Google Web Accelerator'

Good Morning to all of you! Today I am writing about 'Google Web Accelerator’'. Needless to say, this is another technology from Google which I found to be very useful. You can also try it.

Tomorrow is a Sunday and hence will be a holiday. See you on Monday! Wish you a happy weekend and all the best!

Google Web Accelerator (GWA)

Google Web Accelerator is one of the Google's Lab products. It uses the power of Google's global network to make webpages load faster. GWA uses the following strategies:

Sending your page through Google machines dedicated to handling GWA traffic.

Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.

Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.

Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.

Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.

Compressing data before sending it to your computer.

Broadband users only can feel the difference more than dial-up users. Because currently GWA is optimized to speed up webpage loading for broadband connections. But it does not accelerate HTTPS Protocol and large data downloads.

For availing this facility, you will have to download and install it from: http://webaccelerator.google.com. Installation and usage are very easy.

You can see how much time GWA has saved for you in the performance statistics page. Right click on the GWA icon in the system-tray and choose the option performance data. There you can see how much time has been taken for loading the pages with and without GWA.

Grateful thanks to Google and Googlers.