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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Microsoft Azure – cloud computing platform from Microsoft

With big players and enterprises looking up at cloud computing and with salesforce.com taking the lead for on demand applications, can Microsoft be far behind.

At the recently concluded PDC 2008 , MS launched Microsoft Azure ; a host of on demand services.

In fact not in the true sense of cloud computing, Microsoft had started the project codenamed Hailstorm. Initially called .NET My Services it was supposed to be a framework to build applications upon. However for some reason it did not make its mark.

With various changes in the internet shelf of Microsoft, like introduction of Live Services, Skydrive, Office Workspace it was soon becoming ominous that MS shall be launching a new framework for the developer community to embrace.

Microsoft Azure looks all set for cloud computing and even has a SDK/tools which integrate with Visual Studio 2008 ; so developers can code in C# , and other .NET languages.

Some related resources can also be found in the Azure MSDN site.

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