May 29th, 2009 by shashi

The web is agog with the news of engineers at Google announcing their newest and next generation communication tool – Wave. The service looks awesome and sure is a next generation material. And obviously scores of copy cats will try to mimic or even exceed the Wave in its appeal.

But where Google rules is that they’re open sourcing the entire platform (supposedly). Better still, the whole technology is purely built on top of standards and using technologies already available in the open source world.Wave is built on top of XMPP.

We at informedia technologies have been heavy users of XMPP and eJabberd from quite some time now. We’re also coming up with innovative solutions based on XMPP and integrating XMPP with various e-governance apps which takes the entire platform/environment to a whole new high level.

This development not only validates our technology choices, but also serves as the bell weather for things to come. I just hope, people in charge of the decision making processes understand these developments and encourage more open and standards based technologies.

August 19th, 2008 by shashi

In an interview with the Portfolio magazine, Nassim Nicholas Taleb says

Do you realize that we don’t understand globalization? Globalization increases Extremistan. That’s one problem with this Tom Friedman guy—he [the bestselling author of The World Is Flat, which argues the advantages of globalization in the internet age] didn’t seem to understand the very simple dynamics that globalization forces redundancy out of the system. And whenever you don’t have redundancy, you have Extremistan. Things are way too efficient, so the smallest mistake blows up. We depend so much on the internet. Tomorrow, if there’s a problem in Bangalore, we’re toast for a long time, you see?

I’m on a committee at the Pentagon, [the Highland Forum, a study group on risk] and one of the founders of the internet is on it and all these people understand that we need more redundancy in the system to avoid a second crisis that may come from the internet, because we don’t understand it.

And to think of it, the Internet was founded to provide redundancy in case of an emergency.

Life’s awesome

May 19th, 2008 by shashi

Britain’s Prime Minister understands the internet and the power it brings to the masses. So also do the Chinese