Making millions of souls aware

I saw a very interesting site today- MillionSoulsAware.org . The site tries to create awareness for topics that need global attention (like Refugee camps). Whenever someone visits the site and spends a few seconds on the site, the green counter at the top of the site is increased by one. The site owner is keeping track of the IP addresses and does not increment the counter if you access the site from the same IP address. Once the counter hits one million, it is time to move on to the next topic. Such a brilliant idea!!!

Yaris Yaris

Today we bought a Yaris car. We have not received the car yet but have paid the deposit today. Hopefully the car will come in the next 2-3 days. It is a very cute car. Before buying the car, I spent some time reading the Yaris discussion forums online. Not one compliant in the discussion forum except for unavailability of the car. Everyone seems to love their Yaris. We cannot wait to get ours.

Portal talk

Here's a brief synopsis of the direction employee portals, content management and colloboration tools are going in:

* Employee Portals: Microsoft Sharepoint is the killer app out there that has the potential to take the lion's share of this market. Microsoft has done well to integrate it the Office suite. SAP Netweaver Portal also showed a lot of improvement on paper. This is the only product that could pose some challenge to Microsoft in the Employee Portal market. Portal vendors have added Web2.0 features to their applications but it will take sometime before corporations start embracing wikis, blogs, etc. for the Employee portal.
* Content Management: Federated repositories are here to stay and so is SaaS for content management. User acceptance continues to be the biggest challenge for content management deployments. More and more organizations are deploying content management integrated with their Portal application.
* Colloboration Tools: Web 2.0 technologies have made colloboration a lot easier and social tagging in Portal products will be out before 2007 ends. Security, governance and accountability are the big challenges as the corporate environments become more colloborative.

Key Messages
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* 75% of current vendors will provide SaaS services by 2010. We need to assess the impact to the consulting revenue stream and come up with ways to build additional revenue streams?
* 40% of corporations will use open source based products by 2010. We have to be ready for this and not continue to look at Web 2.0 technologies only?
* Internet generation will define how technology shapes itself in the next 5 years. Vendors and corporations will have to evolve to meet their needs. They are the next generation of customers and users.
* Consolidation is the primary reason for implementing Portals. Organizations can live without Portals and still continue to have world-class processes.

How will we buy online 5 years from now?

As I sit back today and reflect on the last few days to see what new things I saw at the conference, there is a lot. I can choose to believe in all the predictions or try to predict myself.

I go for the latter. Firstly I do not think shopping in the malls has changed drastically in the last 40 years. There have been improvements for sure but nothing drastic. We still go to the stores in the mall, select the products we want to purchase and then make the payment. Not all of us like this process of shopping but there is not many different options available out there. You can go to a store that sells everything so that you can buy everything at one place. Or you can make a 'shopping appointment' at one of the fancy stores like Nordstorm's or Bloomingdale's and leave it to the shopping assistant to find what you need.

Now coming to the world of online shopping, the shopping process is a whole lot different in terms of doing multiple things at the same time. There are tons of comparison shopping sites out there that help you find what you need at the lowest price, or the nearest location, etc. As a customer all I need is a single site (just like a single store) that can help me find what I need at the best price. It could be a shopping search engine where I enter. I need a 300GB Hard disk. It could ask me a bunch of questions: Would this hard-disk be internal or external? Do you have any price range in mind or just find the lowest price? Is it okay to find a hard disk bigger than 300GB if it cheaper (that's possible)?, etc. And then based on my answers to these questions say, there is a 350GB Seagate hard disk available for $110 at the Circuit City located next to my home or it can be shipped for $8 within 1 day. That would be great. Maybe there is something like that out there but I have not seen it. So if you know about a site like this, please enlighten me.

The future will change the way products sell. Wherever anything can be sold will be sold. We have already seen ads showing up in games, online experiences and chat rooms like Second Life, blogs, etc. This would mean that the next big online site or application will have features to sell products. What will this be is hard to predict but that is where the answer is. Any thoughts?

Another impetuous decision

Today was the last day of the conference and it was also a half day. We decided to catch a flight early afternoon and leave the conference around 11 in the morning. The idea was to get some lunch before flying out. Airlines have not given real food ever and we did not expect anything from them. Anyway, while driving towards the airport we realized that we had almost 3 hours before the flight and could do some sight-seeing.

We decided to check out Cape Canaveral which is about 40 miles from the Orlando International Airport. It was another impetuous decision after making a trip to Daytona Beach yesterday at the spur of the moment. Also driving 80 miles (back + forth) in less than 2 hours was a challenge. We went ahead with it anyway.

The drive was smooth. We were there in about 65 minutes. The place has a very nice beach called Cocoa Beach. We could not spend too much time out there but saw that the beach was packed. The weather was ideal - 75 degrees fahrenheit. Though it was a bit windy.
We started and the drive back was also uneventful. When we neared the airport, the car gave a signal that it was out of gas. And then something weird happened.

We saw that the car would not accelerate beyond 40mph. It was hovering around there only. The car also started making a lot of noise while driving. Somehow we made it to the rental car return center and returned the car. The rental car service folks were very helpful in resolving the car issues.

We were able to catch the flight in time and be back home on time. Tomorrow I will talk about some of the conference topics/learning.

Daytona Beach

Another great day at the conference. Lots of good information and great presentations. But the highlight of the day was the evening. We left the conference and decided to drive to Downtown Orlando. We passed by the downtown but did not stop as it looked very unimpressive. And then at the spur of the moment decided to drive to Daytona Beach to checkout Daytona USA. Daytona Beach is east of Orlando and is a good 60-90 minute drive. The freeway was smooth and there was hardly any traffic on it. We were in Daytona in about 80 minutes. We checked out Daytona USA from 92 West. It is really a gigantic structure. We did not spend too much time there as we planned to see the Daytona Beach also.

We parked the car at the Ocean Center Parking lot and walked to the beach. The waves were hitting the beach with a lot of aggression, the wind was blowing, everybody looked relaxed and happy, it was like a different world altogether.

We spent 10-15 minutes just walking on the beach, then decided to get some dinner. Surprisingly we did not see too many restaurants there and settled on going to Adobe's Gila, a Mexican joint. We ordered some Jalapeno peppers, vegetarian wrap and a chicken burrito. The food was mediocre at best. The salsa was very different(oily) and tasteless. Anyway we were done with the dinner quickly and decided to drive back to Orlando.

The drive back was uneventful as the traffic was even lighter on the way back.

This is definitely something I will remember as I always wanted to come to Daytona.

Travel blues

I travelled to Orlando on Sunday for a conference. It has been a while since I last flew on United. My current experiences have been on American or NorthWest. United does have nicer planes but I ran into some flight attendants that were having a bad day. They were rude, unhelpful and definitely not interested in making the journey as comfortable as possible for the passengers. Except for that the flight was uneventful.

I did have a few surprises though after I landed. First the Budget customer service person could not locate the key of the car assigned to me and had to assign me a different car. It is a Chevy Trailblazer. I have never driven it and I will never purchase it so it is nice to drive a big SUV for a change. And then after I reached the hotel, the front desk person told me that my reservation was done was February 19th and not March 19th. Thanks to fat-fingering by the Travel Desk at my company. But the staff at the hotel was somehow able to give me a room without any problems.

Now coming to the conference itself. It is quite interesting. I think it takes a lot of guts to stand in front of a thousand people and say - this is how the world will look like in 5 years. Some people do this extremely convincingly. I enjoyed nothing but one session where the presenter was very knowledgable and articulate. It is always a pleasure to listen to such people.

Conference and no fancy dinners, well that cannot happen. We had a team dinner tonight since there are 6-8 of us from my company at the conference. The dinner was at this fancy restaurant in the hotel. Food was nothing much to talk about but the ambience was great. Also, it was good to chat with some of my colleagues about a variety of topics in a relaxed environment.

As the day comes to an end, I look forward to another day of sessions at the conference tomorrow. It should be great as we will get to hear from some experts.

And lastly, India's cricket victory over Bermuda today does not in any way erase the fact that they played lousy and lost to Bangladesh. They will have to repeat this performance when they face Sri Lanka to help erase that loss.

New Home

This is a new blog for me but I am not new to blogging. What is new is that I plan to write more frequently on this blog and also plan to share it with everyone. I have heard that only good can come out of this.

Today I also tried a couple of sites - Ning and Jimdo. Ning is a social networking site and allows users to create their own social networks. I have setup a basic social network at http://weekendplan.ning.com. Please go there and include me in your weekend plans.

Jimdo is focused on hosting user's web pages. It has an amazing editor to allow users to customize the page. I have setup a basic page at http://gagan.jimdo.com . It is very basic with hardly any content as I was just trying out the editing features on the site. The other amazing thing is that the company is based in Germany. So on some pages you run into German text. But overall a great tool.

I will write an update once I get a chance to spend some more time on Ning and Jimdo.