Location Based Networking – making it work for you

Social networking has become more than a past time , if seen seriously it looks like it has still more challenges to cross, but barring the challenges it has brought in a lot of change , in the way we look today.

But, there is a drawback here, if you need to find a people from the place one is in, one has to search and find the friend. This has given to a new form of social networking – location based networking. Some like Mates is based on Relationship Engine / Relationship Space Navigator. Right now there are many such networks, my favourite being Skout , it is expanding its network by every day. Location based networking sites, allows the user to find out other users from the same location. Of course it also lets you search people from other locations. In Scout for example you have a microblog too , so its a combination of Twitter and a social networking tool.

Location based networking, looks to have tremendous potential effectively. In a recently concluded architecture conference, there was a small brainstorming session ; I am giving some excerpts below:-

Background
Jack and Anne are both in Hawaii, for their business trips. Jack is a venture capitalist, and Anne is in business development for her startup. They don’t know each other but staying in the same hotel. They both have their own plans during the upcoming Saturday. Unfortunately on Saturday morning , it starts to rain and their plans gets spoiled.

How can location based networking help
With a location based networking tool , both Jack and Anne can find each other with similar keywords,”staying at Hilton”. Now the relationship engine navigator searches the network and can find Jack , Anne and other people staying at Hilton. This is also possible through GPS , but I think Relationship Engine would be a better choice, as it used certain features available in GPS too.

Once Jack has found Anne, or other people they can request for a invite and get connected. So the dull weekend may turn out to be a business opportunity for Jack and Anne.

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Surface Computing and Retail turns out to be real

Echoing on one of my last posts , I had mentioned that Surface computing has a lot to do with the retail industry .

I had given an example about a cafe shop using surface computing and SaaS, but also mentioned that it can be extended to the retail sectors, eg the hotel industry .

So the next time you check into a hotel , you don’t have to wait for someone to guide you through – may it be the hotel itself, or flip through the menu cards . Software can take care of that – in fact surface computing finds one of its market in there.

Sheraton and Microsoft has just done that – Microsoft Surface at play in Sheraton – taking away the pain of the long cues and other stuff .

Somehow , whatever I am thinking or putting into my blog post is coming out real in some way or the other.

Let me see when people in India shall realize the potential of surface computing. The economy has gone north and this is one of the best time to show case the potential to the clients and get some business.

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Future of computing – is it cloud computing all the way

A lot of debate has been happening over the last couple of days, what shall be future of software architecture as cloud computing , SaaS, PaaS (Platform as a Service), S+S looms over.Cloud Computing : In simple terms cloud computing is throwing back the computing resources to the internet. There are two things in cloud computing a) one needs internet connectivity b) a big infrastructure is needed by the provider. The second one is only by big software players like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Amazon… and of course users can use them.

Network Issues : There are various geographies where there is no internet penetration, but people working there are contractors working for big names like Walmart, Banana Republic etc. So how is cloud computing going to help them … at least I think it wont.

The above point rules out the fact that cloud computing can not exist alone.

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Google all set to conquer the web

After Google‘s flagship product , its search engine ( no marks for guessing that right ), Google has gained poularity for its other free products , specailly the GMail . GMail has soon become the favourite web mail … I guess its probably the leading one now … even though there were several other email providers which had started a decade before Gmail had .

Close to the heels of GMail there came Google Docs, Orkut and Google Page Creator…. there are many but these are the most commonly used – I have tried with Google Sites, but I get an error everytime. They have all become quite successful and recently Orkut has exposed its OpenSocial api for developers to build gadgets … something Facebook was having earlier and still has .

But Web 2.0 probably had lots of more to offer .. there was competetion from different quarters … user generated inputs ( Twitter ), virtual socialization (Vivaty, Vside) .

So I guess Google started acquistions …. Jaiku , a similar tool like twitter has been acquired by Google . Google completed the circle this week, by launching Lively , something similar to Vivaty.

In fact Vivaty and Lively were launced to the public on the same day. Both Vivaty and Lively needs a player to be downloaded which I dont like, there are virtual networking sites which work directly on Flash, ( Minilife ). I dont know what are is the architecture behind Lively and Vivaty .

But with I guess if these are RIA applications , then SilverLight or Adobe AIR would have been needed for installation , well these are my guesses.

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Surface Computing – the new era of computing

In my last post I wrote about one of the immense possibilities provided by surface computing.

Though there was not much about Microsoft Surface ( code name: Milan ) available, when I am writing this … the idea looks very much interesting .

Also found out that my idea has been incorporated by MS in one of its projects ,

Nice to note that .