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.

January 8th, 2009 by shashi

There is an interesting article in the NY Times on  R. It’s heartening to see that free and open source tools like R are getting noticed for it’s worth. Mainly because free and open source tools do not have any PR firms pitching for them nor do they have any marketing droids peddling stories to the mainstream media.

So, something like this sort gets noticed when there is an undercurrent of adopters and influential users. This story also gives an idea to the naive about the power of open source development and its advantages. Good!

The article also has a proprietory competitor dismissing the *popularity* as saying “it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code”. She also says

“We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.”

Hilarious!! I was literally ROTFL when I read that.

May 7th, 2008 by shashi

• Was Microsoft really interested in buying Yahoo! ?
• Did Jerry Yang do the right thing by rebuffing Ballmer ?
• Will the Yahoo! investors remain quiet even after losing out on the deal ?
• Does Microsoft realise they could/can never integrate Yahoo into their own ?

• Would the merger have been a good thing for Zimbra users ?
• Did Microsoft lose out on it’s only chance of becoming a contributor to Open Source ?
• Would projects like Hadoop, YUI, Zimbra died a premature death under the Microsoft’s management ?

• Seemingly unrelated events influence one’s personal and professional lives in ways that can not be even imagined.

April 4th, 2008 by shashi

I was the keynote speaker at a local opensource fest. Here are the slides I’d prepared for the same. [odp][ppt]

BTW, the video which may miss out is this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE