This weekend I stumbled on novel called ‘TAG‘ by Simon Royle. Set in 22nd century, its a futuristic thriller with the usual save the world plot-line. But what really works for the book is its take on how our current technology and trends will transition into the 2110 – hundred years from now. So hundred years from now we will live in globally unified and single political system and will be able to move across geographic areas (not countries) without restrictions. Our habit of shortening every word will become formalized with enterprises becoming ents, money / credit becoming creds etc. Its an easy read with a future you can relate to given how internet is significantly is altering our way of communicating and living.

Highly recommended!! I only hope Simon’s next adds more twists and thrill to the plot now that his first book has successfully established the future world he wanted to present.

It is also very exhilarating to see to how amazon and the internet have lowered the entry barriers in content creation significantly to allow writers like Simon Royle self-publish and still find the right and significant consumers.

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Theme 1: Big Data @ Enterprise: We have seen data gain prominence over the cloud / internet last year. In fact, it became so huge that we saw a whole elephant family (Mahout, Hive, Pig, Zookeeper) get established around Hadoop. But so far we have seen these implementations apply to high volume web environments and in 2011, we will see this trend go mainstream and into enterprise environments. We will see firms architecting and building solutions for delivering Data As a Service to its internal consumers.

Theme 2: tabpadbook: 2010 was the year of smartphones with a glimpse of the tablet but 2011 will be the year of the tablet, pad, book whatever you want to call it. We hopefully will see a lot more 7-10 inch touch screen based devices in the market beyond the usual suspects from Apple, Blackberry, Samsung – Google. Watch for details as they emerge post CES over this weekend. Pixel Qi screens will go mainstream with these devices. I am hoping Notion Ink’s Adam delivers and stands the competition from the giants.

Theme 3: mo-vi calls: We have seen the possibility with Facetime but will see the mobile video calls get more mainstream and cross device this year with all smartphones and tablets investing in a front camera and applications like tango.

Theme 4: momemes: this year we saw how viral an app like angry birds can get and this phenomenon is likely to get industrialized in 2011 with marketing and branding experts exploring such mobile memes. Infact now with app stores moving beyond mobiles, the memes are likely to spread on desktops and netbooks too.

I hope to expand on each theme in the future posts with my thoughts and research on each so keep watching the space ……

2010 seemed to be the year of the facebook – what with a movie ‘The social network‘ on it and Mr. Zuckerberg being recognized as ‘Person of the Year’ by Time. At this time, towards the end of 2010, facebook and its likes will have all of us believe that the friend list we build on their networks are true reflection of our real life friend circle or at least the way we would like it to be given no physical boundaries and spaces.

This post is not about the movie or facebook at all but on how in my belief that all networking sites have got it wrong and need to evolve further to reflect the real life social networks of people, instead of treating the whole network as equal.

In real life, the friendships are made around life events like school, college, job or passions / hobbies like bungee jumping, food and typically such networks are mutually exclusive with totally different types of conversations. In fact we even meet such groups independently and try not to mix them as the connects are at totally different planes and use different reference points (memories) to share. In fact the chances are that the school friend circle may not be comfortable with say the circle of friends you have for bungee jumping.

Sites like facebook, linked-in force us to treat all friends same and share with all the exact same thoughts and conversations which I believe leads us to only share the Lowest Common Denominator which may apply to all our friends. Thus such sites are turning more into the public face of the individual which we consciously cultivate instead of allowing natural conversations to take place. The charm of such sites thus wear-off soon after the initial excitement of finding long lost friends.

The industry understands the issue and is trying to come up with solutions like social browser (RockMelt) or aspect specific social network (Diaspora) but there’s a long way to go before such become mainstream. Needless to say the social web is evolving though is still in its infancy and we should see a lot more changes coming in 2011.

Happy new year to all !!

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• Diaspora Hands On: Social Networking Built on Privacy (appscout.com)
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• Flock Refresh Trumps RockMelt (informationweek.com)

I have started using tumblr (dentrassi.tumblr.com) for posting links, photos, random thoughts, quotes, web clippings for which a traditional blogging site like wordpress seems to be an overhead and a micro-blogging site like twitter a little under-powered and overwhelming.

In the world of micro-blogs, mini-blogs and blogs it is getting tougher to identify the best suited space for not so regular bloggers like me. Lets see how this goes .. keeping my fingers x-ed !!

Are you still using Subversion as Version Control or have transitioned to Mercurial or Git. If you have transitioned, WELL DONE !! Please comment on what has been your experiences.

If you have not and are still living with the branch-merge mess that is Subversion, its time to step back and see the world beyond. Joel (Joel on Software) has written an excellent tutorial on transitioning into Mercurial or any such distributed version control !

Also read the earlier post I had on DVCS and Feature Branching !

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Internet and digitally interconnected worlds now produce over 1 ZB (Zettabyte) and making sense out of these large volumes of such structured and unstructured data has become an industry in itself !!

Data Visualization and Information Graphics are the natural extension and front-end to most data mining, analytics efforts. Following are some of the best tools and softwares available for helping in visualizing data:

1. Tableau Software (they also have a public version for creating visualizations from public data)
2. Qlikview
3. Swivel , Many Eyes , Google Visualization API
4. 28 Rich data tools

A great visualization example on how successful tech companies grow.
Dashboard at 570

While the Web 2.0 and public data domains have been seeing this need and visualization efforts towards it for some time, the trend is also catching up and being demanded by large traditional institutions including financial services firms. Recently there is a lot of funding and efforts towards building dashboards for senior management across the functional areas.

So what tools are you using in your projects for data visualization ?  What kind of dashboards are you being asked to build ?

Image via Wikipedia

Last year, I had written about code review tools like Jupiter and ReviewBoard on this blog.

Just wanted to update that list by adding the google web based tool to the mix called Gerritt. Closely integrated with Code repository like Git, it forces a peer based review as part of the build life-cycle. Here is the typical development – code commit workflow followed by Google team

Does your team and project have a similar workflow defined and have a peer review tool used in as part of development cycle. If yes, which one do you use ?

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• @task Project Management Software Update – Workflow Control with Extended Approval Management Process (eon.businesswire.com)

Now it seems Justus Bruns and Ernst-Jan Pfauth want to turn that thought into reality by inviting artists and donations for turning these bill-boards into displaying art using the internet. Very noble thought indeed … it just needs a commercial supporter (absolut ?) .

Imagine Coca Cola giving away its billboard space to showcase upcoming artists works on times square !! Now that will be quite a sight !

Do follow them on the web and twitter to see this turn into reality in 2010. Happy Holidays !!

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Today, 26/11/2009 is one of the most life humbling anubhav of my life yet. Experience in hindi is called‘Anubhav’.  Anubhav is also the name of my youngest cousin brother on the maternal side. Today he is no more…

Today we lost one of the youngest member of my generation in the family today to a freak road accident and nothing can be more humbling and shocking than losing a loved one at a young age of 22.

Today has made me realize that world is not really flat and no technology advancement of internet, telephone, Voip can ever replace your physical presence with your family in this moment of sadness and tragedy. Being outside India for the past few years, I have missed a lot of family events like marriages, grah – pravesh, new-borns but no other moment has ever made the distance between the work-country and the home-country so apparent and made us feel so constrained and helpless !!

May Anubhav’s soul rest in peace and God give our family enough strength to bear the loss !