I was at the Bangalore startup lunch last Saturday at the NSCREL, IIM Bangalore. It was a good event overall, with participation from about 8 startups. The agenda of startup lunch was to provide a platform for Startups and Job seekers, so that they can get know startups better, their work culture and the works. Went to the event with no specific goal as a job seeker, but ended up having interesting conversations with many founders. The organizing team has a nice scoop of the event here.
Kudos to the organizing team for putting up a great show!Great job guys - Sridhar, Ashish and Pradeep !
If you are interested in working for a startup - here’s a list of startups in Bangalore along with positions that they are looking for.
Yahoo released their new version of the popular Y! messenger with an exclusive version built for Vista on WPF. This is currently only for preview. The UX is brilliant, and this app brings more of a human touch to conversations with smooth transitions and the likes.
The app however does not run on XP even if you have .NET 3.0 and the other jazz. But this looks and feels so much like a native Vista app, including the richness and the transparencies. This new version also provides a good deal of customization, with the usual laundry list of features. These two features were extremely useful
The Vista gadget which comes along with this IM is very useful and enables you to drag and drop your favorite contacts on to your sidebar so that you can ping them from there itself.
Being able to switch between different people that I’m chatting with in a single window.
But the bigger question is, ‘What do you think provides more value’ - a quick and dirty IM chat client like Gtalk (also built into your gmail) or an app like this which provides a great UX.
The Expression around the clock event happened yesterday in Bangalore at Fuga, a cool venue for an even cooler event. This was a global designer conference(taking place simultaneously in 10 venues around the globe) aptly themed “Design is back!”
The event started with out with registration, Microsoft had a very strict registration and confirmation process for this event and inspite of that the place was packed with people. There were about 200 people and seating was available only for about 70 people.
The event kicked off with a keynote from Shelly Armstrong of the Microsoft Design team. Shelly has been involved in various projects in Microsoft, including the interaction design for the XBox and the Zune. Her talk was totally targeted towards designers and tips on improving UX, design, importance of keeping up with latest trends, networking etc.
After this there was a break, with the bar being opened up [:)]. There was more action ahead though. The next session was by Supreet Singh, an UX designer and Pandurang, a dev. They started out with a desinger dev duel and demostrated how Expression Studio supported the designer-dev collaboration with ease. This was pretty interesting, with Surpreet putting in a video on to his canvas and then Pandurang writing a bit of code for the play and pause functionality.
The dev, (as they put it, didn’t have much idea about UX) and hence he puts up text messages for play and pause. Surpreet then takes this XAML and immediately ports this message into a cool button.
The next part was demos - impressive stuff overall, though I had seen most of them before. The demo which impressed me the most, was the one of a Silverlight video player being able to play 10 high definition videos simultaneously with ease, and the ability for the user to seamless switch between them with no system overload.
Post this was the usual networking session (with more beers though!). Met a couple of interesting people and managed to market ADITI’s UX blog. People seemed to be very interested by this, especially because we are not a design only firm.(Thanks Ram ! for mentioning our blog in your post.)
At the end, Microsoft gave away a goodie bag to each participant. It had a 60-day trial of the Expression Studio, a design magazine and a Reebok t-shirt!.
The event will cover a range of User Experience (UX) technologies that will enable designers and developers to build next generation desktop and web applications. I am particular excited in seeing new demos on Silverlight and WPF and new features which are to be added to Expression studio.
This space of Rich Internet applications with Microsoft introducing Silverligt and Adobes traction on Flex is very exciting and the next few months will tell us who the real pioneer will be.
If you are going to be at the event, leave me a comment and we can network there.
For over quite some time now, there has been a great interest in using Web 2.0 concepts withing the enterprise. The whole concept of Web 2.0 has been evolving and has gained iconic status in business and technical worlds alike.
Web 2.0 has many concepts associated with it - blogs, wikis, mashups, social networking, RSS, content tagging and many more. Most of these concepts are based on an user centric approach where the user is the focal point of action/attention. Enterprises are hence realizing that it makes a lot of sense to replicate these concepts within their organization to improve collaboration and communication and hence improve productivity.
However using Web 2.0 concepts within an enterprise requires a drastic mind shift within people. Information is now openly available, and people can easily express their views on the same. This will need to go hand in hand with a good change management and user education process.
The idea here is look at enterprise 2.0 from two prespectives - Internal facing and extrernal facing. Here’s my take on the most important faces of Enterprise 2.0
Collaboration 2.0 - An unoffical term for the collaboration strategies within the enterpise, this seems to be gaining a lot of traction within enterprises. The ability for multiple people to work on a document and then have preset workflows which get kicked in, are very useful and can play a key role in improving efficiency and productivity. SharePoint (or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) is a product which I think holds a lot of promise in this space and clearly there is a lot of traction around using MOSS 2007 within large enterprises and ISVs.
Other collaboration tools which are popularly used within enterprises include Wikis, which hold a lot of promise for easy information sharing and editing.
Syndication/RSS feeds - This would enable everyone to keep in touch with items most important to them through notifications, feeds etc
Informal modes of communication - This has led to the use og instant messaging services, SMS, etc for communication with the enterprise.
Rich User Experience (UX) - This is becoming ever so important in the Enterprise 2.0 era. The ability to engage users and have them get their work done easily is of primary importance. Some examples include Rich Internet applications built on AJAX, Flex, Flash, and Silverlight. Other concepts such as Office Business Applications (OBA) enable pulling in data from Line of business systems and surface them up in portals with a rich user experience.
Employee blogs - Blogs are an ideal channel for employees to showcase their ideas and also put up their questions, opinions etc. Blogs are also being used as marketing tools where companies primarily use their blogs/ employee blogs as showcase pieces or even to break some important news about product releases etc to the world.
Software as a Service (SaaS) - Desktop software is becoming passe` in the web 2.0 world and running softwares on the network (or cloud) is potentially one of the best software models which has a lot of potential.
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.
Orkut, the second largest online social network has a new look. Apparently they are rolling out the new redesign to select groups of users and their blog states that they will continue to do this over coming weeks.
One of their goals have to been to maintain the “true blue simplicity” but at first glance I find the white backgrounds and the rounded corners to be very distracting.
Tafiti is a mashup that uses the resources of Windows Live Search driven by a Silverlight user interface. The result is a search engine with a totally new experience.
Tafiti (which is the Swahili word for “do research”) uses a desktop metaphor to search across media types and even filter your data result set multiple times. So here’s my take on Tahiti
The good
1. Provides a stack view of my search results – Ability to drag multiple search results on to the right pane and to label a stack of results.
2. You can email items of a stack to people, which is pretty useful.
3. Ability to blog about a stack you have created on your Live Space account.
4. Ability to pivot the search results by RSS feeds, books, news items, images. I found this to be very useful . It does not stop here, you can in fact view contextual information on a book. (This feature however doesn’t seem to be working currently)
5. Here is one cool feature, though it took me some time to figure out how to get to this – On your web search results, there is a tree icon and clicking on which provides a real tree view visualization of your search results. You can choose to view how many results you wish to see and hovering over a result provides a brief description of the same. Very cool, but doubt if people will find value.
The bad
1. A somewhat jerky experience throughout, not as smooth as WPF desktop applications.
2. There are some issues with resolution, does not run perfectly on lower resolutions.
3. No pagination for search results – there’s only a more link which is not great usability.
4. There’s a text box for filtering the search results – where you can actually type and I figured that it does a text comparison with the search results and pivots them. Not a common standard for filters - users might be expecting a drop down etc.
5. Try right clicking on the site and you will notice only one option called ‘Silverlight configuration’ clicking on which provides a note about silverlight. I am really hoping that this is customizable ?
6. It opens up all the search results in a new IE window, which is not great usability.
Overall, it’s worth a shot, though I am sure that Microsoft realizes that no one is going to use this as a search engine, it’s more of an effort to showcase the power of silverlight and maybe the future of rich internet applications.
provide a platform for Startups and Job seekers, so that they can get know startups better, their work culture and the works. Went to the event with no specific goal as a job seeker, but ended up having interesting conversations with many founders. The organizing team has a nice scoop of the event here.
currently only for preview. The UX is brilliant, and this app brings more of a human touch to conversations with smooth transitions and the likes.
