Understanding spatial search
November 4, 2008
So what is spatial search ?
In today’s context, where the Internet is the starting point for finding any information you need about anything in the world, and of course most of us use Google. The problem with traditional search is that it does not support or have information about the geographical dimension.
Why is spatial search important ?
This becomes extremely important when searching for something like “Guest houses in Bangalore”. Although the geographical location, in this case ‘Bangalore’ can be used as a part of search query term, the search engine does not interpret it as a geographical location.
So results for the search query – “Guest houses in Bangalore” will turn up documents with “Guest houses” and “Bangalore” and might not show up results with guest houses koramangala or indiranagar which are localities in Bangalore and also hence very apt results. This is because, the search engine does not have a relationship between these terms.
The other issue with traditional search in entities like homes is that the geographical information of these locations are not known, and hence they cannot be visualized on a map – which would be the most intuitive way to visualize these results.
While planning and architecting my100floors, we understood the need for Spatial search and helping users visualize home searches on maps. Moreover we felt that that searching for properties on maps was the intuitive way to find properties. In fact, we are the first to provide a map based search in India, cracking the problem of non-availability of geo-coded data.
The next post will talk about our implementation of Spatial search in, challenges we faced and a walk through of the user experience.
my100floors.com is currently in closed beta, leave your email address on the site and drop me a line here or on twitter and I will make sure that you get the invite.
Google Chrome and Pranayama
October 14, 2008
Off topic, but couldn’t resist blogging about this.
Baba Ramdev’s (a yogic guru from India) effort to connect with tech geeks and urge them to take up pranayama (meditation). Awesome marketing and product position I must say!
Google Chrome and Prananyama and Baba Ramdev
Image Source : Dead President
Top 10 Twitter tools for a power user
October 11, 2008
The Twitter obsession (and addiction) continues, we are all hooked on to it, aren’t we.
If you aren’t already, do follow me on Twitter.
So for all the Twitteratti / Tweeple / Tweeps out there, here’s my list of top 10 tools / plugins (in no particular order) for Twitter to enhance your Tweeting experience.
Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck takes all the information from Twitter and helps you manage the information overload by grouping them into managable pieces or based on your interests.
Twitturly
Tracks Top URLs which are talked about on Twitter. Extremely useful service and helps you find the most interestsing and latest information on the web.
Twitter Patterns
Helps you give your twitter page some style! They have some really cool designs, check it out.
Twitterfeed
Very useful app, which automatically tweets whenever you publish a post on your blog. Helps you get some link love!
Easy Tweets
A handy tool for online and digital marketers who wish to leverage the advantages of social media and microblogging. Easy Tweets enables you to switch between multiple Twitter accounts, track follower, replies etc all from one dashboard.
Hashtags
Hashtags enable you to track and follow conversations on Twitter. Follow @hashtags on Twitter and the service will index your tweets. Then add a #tagname to your tweet and this can be instantly looked up or searched.
Quotably
This service lets you follow a user’s conversations in a threaded manner, showing you all the various people the given user has had a conversation with. Interesting tool, especially when you trying to find out what others are saying about your brand/service.
Plodt
Power Twitter
Twitter Keys
Twitter keys is a fun tool for Twitter which enables you to use UTF8 symbols in your tweets. Once downloaded, this appears as a floating window, so all you need to do is to choose your symbol, copy n paste. So come on, get creative in your tweets using these symbols.
One special feature
Vakow
Vakow is an India focussed service which lets you post to Twitter as an SMS. Very useful and probably the cheapest way to pot to Twitter via mobile in India.
Let me know what you like and what tool you use.
Of twitter, microblogging et all
September 18, 2008
Twitter, of course has been one of the main reasons why I don’t get time to write on this blog. Most of the times, 140 characters seems to be more than enough to convey what I want to say. Moreover, I always end up having very interesting conversations there and the there’s always instant feedback from a set of very engaged audience.
I have now been using Twitter seriously for sometime now, so thought so sharing some stats. Thanks to Twitter Stats and TweetStats which helped me to churn out these graphs.
Tweets per hour
Tweets per day
Twitter Timeline
Top @replies
So if you are already on twitter, follow me.
Creating beautiful word clouds
August 13, 2008
I stumbled upon Wordle - which as they like to claim is a “toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide”
They accept anything from free text, to blogs RSS feeds and del.icio.us tag clouds and create stunning looking word clouds from them. The clouds are created based on the similar tag cloud concept, where words that are frequently repeated are shown with more prominence.
Simple idea, small app with a lot of impact. I just wish they had a “Save as jpg” option though. Below is a word cloud I created from this blog. Check Wordle out and let me know what you think.
Open Coffee Club meetups
July 31, 2008
I will be attending the open coffee club (OCC) meetup on August 3rd. 08. Details of the event are here.
For the unintiated, let me talk about OCC and what it does. 
OCC bangalore is an open forum for Entrepreneurs, VC’s and budding Entrepreneurs to come together and connect with each other at the grass root level. The group holds its meetings every alternate Sunday in Bangalore.
The Open coffee club was an international initiative to enable entrepreneurs to connect with each other and started off in London in 2007.
The meeting this Sunday, Aug 3rd is very interesting where we will be meeting Mr. Rajeev K Purnaiya, a serial entrepreneur who recently launched hooeey – a tool which enables users to manage their online productivity.
Before this, Rajeev founded CyberBazaar, India’s first and largest conferencing company which was eventually acquired by WebEx.
This is going to be one great meet with many other interesting people like Vijay Anand of Proto.in, Sameer Gulgani of Morpheus Venture Partners, Anjana Vivek of VentureBean, Anjana Kaul of Footprint ventures and Ganesh Rengaswamy (Ex-Greylock) expected to be there.
The event
Date: 3rd Aug 08
Day: Sunday
Time: 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Venue: Principal Axis, 34/1 Crescent Road, Bangalore, 560 001.
Office Board Line: 4126 6279/80/81 (request you to call the front desk in this week and make sure you get the directions correct so as to avoid delays on Sunday.
Mark your confirmation of attendance from here.
If you plan to be at the event, we can catch up there, drop me a message on Twitter or leave a comment here.
To new beginnings!
July 22, 2008
As most of you know, I have finally taken the plunge and decided to join a startup. I will be starting from Monday, 21st July 08 as a Product manager with a stealth mode startup based out of Bangalore.
I am really looking forward to this new gig and am sure that the startup experience is going to be one roller coaster ride with many twists and turns. Above all, I think that it will be a great learning experience for me and can add a lot of value to my career.This somehow seemed to be the perfect time to juggle things up in life and I got a great opportunity.
We have a small team of around 10 people and I am really looking forward to interacting with each of them and for some great times ahead. I will of course miss all the folks from ADITI and the fun we’ve had together.
So here’s to new beginnings, Cheers!
DCamp Bangalore 2.0
July 7, 2008
Design Camp 2.0 bangalore is all set to happen on the 26th July, 2008. This time it is being hosted at ADITI along with the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA). To participate in the event you can register on the wiki from here.
Date : 26th July, 2008. 10 AM onwards.
Location : Aditi Technologies
224/16, Ramana Maharishi Road, Sadashivanagar, Bangalore – 80
DCamp is an unconference focused broadly on design and user experience community. It is open to everyone interested in the topic: designers, usability practitioners, developers, marketers, entrepreneurs, and other audiences.
We already have close to 50 registrations with very interesting speaker slots. If you wish to speak at the event, sign up for a speaker slot on the wiki.
If you have any interesting ideas for the event or wish to have discussions / BOF sessions around specific topics, leave me a comment or call me on 98866 38995.
See you there!
Silverlight on Nokia Phones
March 4, 2008
Wow! this is quite some news. Never imagined something like this to happen.
Microsoft Silverlight, the cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering next-generation media experiences and rich
interactive applications will now be available for S60 on Symbian OS, the world’s leading smartphone software, as well as for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets. Adding support for Silverlight will extend opportunities for developers to create rich, interactive applications that run on multiple platforms in a consistent and reliable way. This move will enable S60 application developers to use a wider range of dev environments.
Here’s the offiicial press release from Nokia.
This is BIG for Microsoft and Silverlight, as the collaboration with Nokia will enable taking the Silverlight experience to millions of users on devices which will be used everyday by end users. This will also be a lithmus test for Silverlight for ensuring it’s cross platform compatibility.
I think that is a great move, which will enable mobile users to see their applications move to the next level of user experience and usability. I am personally looking forward to seeing some great mobile apps built on Silverlight. Some demos are expected at the MIX.
