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.
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.
Of tears and Microsoft !
February 18, 2008
Scoble claims to have been moved to tears after seeing a demo by the Microsoft Research team.
Something like this coming from Scoble is quite rare and this of course led to an avalanche of blog posts and predictions as to what this ground breaking thing could be. Popular predictions included Photosynth , Seadragon etc.
Scoble then came back with ‘Misreading Scoble on Microsoft cry’
One particular line caught my attention
The thing I’m talking about is NOT anything you’ve seen Microsoft do before.
And this
That said, I think it will stand up to the kind of hype I unleashed yesterday. It is still inspiring me and I still want to get my hands on it as soon as possible.
Wonder what this could be ? Any predictions ? Btw, as per Scoble’s claims we would be getting to know about this by Feb 27.
asklaila – India’s local information service
February 5, 2008
Trying to decide on a nice restaurant for a date in Koramangala and can’t decide where to go or what to do ? AskLaila, from Four Interactive comes to your rescue. Asklaila aims to answer common questions of Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? within your city.
Currently they have local information services for Bangalore and Mumbai (which was launched a couple of weeks ago). I had a chat with their team and they were telling me that you can soon expect to see asklaila in all metros and other major cities in India in next few months.
I think this product has some great potiential (especially going by the vision of their passionate team !) in the Indian consumer market and the next couple of years will determine how consumers actually percieve the real value from local products.
Below is a SWOT (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats ) analysis I did on their product.
Note : The opinions expressed here are totally from my perception of the product 
Physics with some crayon
November 17, 2007
Isn’t this game incredibly cool, check the video below. Looks like you really need to know your physics well to play this one This one is from Kloonigames and runs on the tablet PC. A PC version of crayon physics is coming soon.
The user experience on this is incredible, watch how the game reacts as the user draws different figures and tries to achieve their objective. With the Wii and PS3 giving PC games a run for their money, I think innovative concepts like this one are a really good answer.
This makes me wonder about the process of gathering requirements for this game. I’m thinking, there are so many scenarios that need to be captured and then taking a call on which ones the game needs to support and deciding others to be left out. Phew ! It’s actually my dream to do requirements, scenarios and functional specifications for a gaming product. Wouldn’t that be cool
Microsoft beats Google to win Facebook deal
October 25, 2007
After much speculation and rumours, looks like Microsoft has won the Facebook deal with a $240 million investment for 1.6% of the company. If Microsoft’s investment is indicative
of what Facebook is worth, its valuation is somewhere in the ballpark of $15 billion. After having lost out on some other high profile deals such as MySpace, this will be great joy for Microsoft.
The deal makes Microsoft the sole advertising provider for Facebook in the United States and internationally. With facebook’s mamoth user base, this definitely means serious business for Microsoft.
The crucial aspect is how Microsoft takes this forward and improves it’s partnership with Facebook. There is a lot of scope for Microsoft to leverage this deal and work on it and bring on enhancements which will enable some Microsoft Products such as Live Messenger and the Live platform as such to be integrated with Facebook.
My bet is that this is going to be a very interesting time for the Web 2.0 space as we see major players getting into this space.
Image Courtesy : Webcommunityforum
More coverage below
Need to ‘Undo’ on web applications
September 12, 2007
The undo problem is one key aspect I am hoping future web apps will support. I just deleted all my mails in my hotmail inbox and I need to ‘Undo’ but I can’t do it. If this was a desktop application I could have done this in a jiffy. 
This is a huge problem in web apps, though they are not covered too much and not many people talk about them, as we are now pretty much used to this kind of behavior. Web apps work excellent, they store all our data, enable us to access them from anywhere and give us no worry about licenses etc.
But as we move towards looking at a cloud or what some people call as a ‘cloud OS’ it becomes increasingly important to have all the desktop paradigms on the web. This problem was probably not thought about by people because when the web started it was more a data storage medium where documents, files etc were stored and people would read from it, so probably there was never a need for offlines access or storing states. But as we move towards having a cloud OS, and making the web a operation system, it becomes very very important to look at such issues.
John Dowdell from macromedia has some interesting thoughts on storing states where he basically argues as to whether the Back button on the browser needs to smart to capture these changes and also talks about capturing states in web apps.
Having an undo functionality brings about a sense of simplicity in the user’s mind – “What the heck, I can always undo it” and hence brings more confidence. This will play a vital role as people from different age groups, degrees of tech saviness etc start using the web to perform very important and secure activities like paying bills, making purchases online etc.
What’s your solution to this problem ? The best answer gets a special feature on this blog.
Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 with Linux support
September 6, 2007
Microsoft has finally officially announced the release of Silverlight 1.0 with Linux support. Silverlight is Microsoft’s direct reply to Flash and is expected to play a big role in the future of Rich Internet Applications (RIA).
Microsoft’s Silverlight will be supporting Moonlight, the Linux implementation as part of the their partnership with Novell, which was signed earlier this year. They have some really cool partners including Entertainment Weekly and the WWE.
According to Miguel de Icaza, vice president of Developer Platforms and leader of the Mono project at Novell. “Novell is excited to work with Microsoft to extend Silverlight beyond Windows® and Macintosh to Linux with Moonlight, so Linux users everywhere can enhance their rich media and interactive experiences on the Web.”
Most RIA enthusiasts are however looking for the release of Silverlight 1.1 which will support the Common Language Runtime (CLR) in .NET and make writing applications for the web much easier.
However this is going to be a very interesting period, with Microsoft penetrating into the Linux user base and enhancing their experience and with Adobe working on various improvements to flash at the same time.
Using Office Business Applications to increase productivity
August 8, 2007
This post is long pending. I have been fascinated by the new generation of composite applications which are very powerful and help in boosting productivity and operational efficiency. So let’s take this step by step.
What are OBAs ?
OBAs are basically a new breed of composite applications which enable information workers to work on their legacy systems and other systems in the backend with a Microsoft Office 2007 front end. These systems surface up the data from the Line of Business (LOB) applications and enable people to perform actions on them.
What is the need for OBAs ?
People typically perform significant additional work outside of the formal processes of a line-of-business (LOB) system as they collaborate with other people via phone and email, obtain information from multiple sources in the form of documents and spreadsheets, and switch between online and offline modes for meetings and business trips. OBAs help simplify this interaction by fitting within the informal processes that information workers actually follow. Organizations can use OBAs to build their won solutions, integrate with it and connect to an external line of Business (LOB) application so as to ensure that information is easily available and people can be more productive. This also rules out the need for getting resources trained on the Line of business applications.
Typical scenario for an OBA
Let’s look at a typical scenario where OBAs can be used and how they can help solve problems within the existing systems. The legacy systems are based on transactional processes that are necessary in order to accomplish specific tasks—for example, creating a Purchase Order. What is not effectively captured are the ad hoc, local people-driven processes that people do in order to accomplish a task like this. For instance – people have to collaborate with other members in their team to get required inputs from them for completing a purchase order. The purchase manager will also require to get information from suppliers and other requirements which need to be collated. Once he has completed the purchase order, he might also have to get it approved from his maanger. The exisitng systems do not support these activites and they are outside of the system. So these systems are being used for merely storing the data and not for collaboration and decision making.
However using an OBA, the purchase manager can collaborate with other people in his team using a sharepoint team site, brainstorm on ideas using a wiki and then collate all this information easily as this available in one single place. He could also have ad hoc meetings and discussions if his MOSS portal is integrated with Live Communication Server, enabling him to start a chat conversation with any of his colleagues or suppliers. On completing the purchase order, he has a custom workflow which routes the document to his manager and once it is approved, he has it automatically sent to the suppliers. The business application simulates the actual way the work gets done rather than just being a repository for information.
If you are interested in browsing OBA solutions built by Microsoft Partners, check 
