Building prototypes

Most of us knew that prototyping is a way to communicate quickly about what is possible with a given idea; an easier method of prototyping could be done via paper prototyping. The video "paper prototyping" illustrated below is a good one to get started with, if you are thinking about creating prototypes of your own.

 

Paper prototyping is a quick and an easier way to learn:

 

1. Is your idea, effective?

 

2. what your customers might be interested?

 

3. Find gaps in your idea, or fill in the missing pieces!

 

Once you collect the feedback from your paper prototyping, it might be a good idea to do a digital (software) prototype, using several tools that are available today. If you want to target a broader audience, then paper prototyping doesn't scale up and hence it would be worthy enough to invest in a digital prototyping. Based on my experience, I would recommend MS Expression Blend 3.0; it is a quick way to build your web portals or UI designs; bounded by SQL, or static data. I have used Visual studio and Power point in the past to build proto-types, but found that Expression Studio does a better job. How is Expression Blend better than others? One major aspect of the prototyping is the layout of the UI elements, Expression studio's layout is closer to human drawing when compared to the layout that you get out of other tools. But how does human drawing does better, over a polished look, exactly? To understand the difference, here is what I am talking about:

 

 

 

As you can see, the first combo box was done using power point and it is polished; while the second is done, using Expression Blend. When we use a polished outlook, the reviewers might tend to focus more on the aesthetics aspect of the design, rather than the design itself; that's how our brains work. So having a rougher sketch will help our brains to think broader and it does not funnel our thoughts.

 

Try it and share your thoughts!

 

Happy prototyping :)

Interesting China....

15 facts about china that will blow your mind (posted 2010-2)

The 19 Must-Know Chinese Consumer Companies That Are Taking Over The World And Growing Like Crazy

A fresh start to Formula 1 - M Schumacher is back!!!

I feel like I am one of those Geico caveman...not knowing that M Schumacher, my favorite driver returned to track to my once up on a time favorite sport Formula1...

I admit how outdated I am with the news...when I happened to glance the SPDHD a HD sports channel, I heard the name Schumacher then I thought it was Ralf Schumacher...but then when I saw the driver’s name was “M Schumacher”, I could not believe my own eyes, I searched the web to know that my favorite driver is indeed back on track...

Welcome back Schumi!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1xXV1R4yVY

Dear fans of M Schumi, hope Schumi rocks again and keep our adrenaline on the rush...Enjoy!

Although my enthusiasm for the game is not as high as it used to be...I have decided to watch at least two complete Formula 1 races this year...alright I got to go back to watching the Australian race...

M Schumi @ F1 - http://www.formula1.com/teams_and_drivers/drivers/7/

PS. My buddy Muthu was the one who created the interest in me for F1

Lot more left in speech to text

As you can see in the image below (done by Google CC) - the text inside the green box, you can't stop laughing once you understand that Vint Cerf was actually trying to say "free Wi-Fi service" and not " free WIFE service". This clearly shows that we have a lot more left to innovate in technology to better understand ourselves...



May be not pure speech to text helps analyze the conversation. The engine doing the work of analyzing should be powered with some intelligence and understand who is talking, their profile, the context in which the talk is going on, the audience etc etc... I am sure there are lots of companies working on this space.

But for now; with the current state of technology...we could get more such examples to mock at...

The cloud language - What's next with the internet

This is a cool talk for the nerds. Hey watch out especially for the segment where Vint quotes a phrase that is just awesome...the phrase is as below.

"i learn less and less about more and more until practically I know nothing about anything..."

My daily digest...

I get asked as to what websites I visit frequently; more on daily basis for news, science, interesting articles etc...

Here are the websites I much on:

News
http://www.techmeme.com/

http://www.wallstreetjournal.com/

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/

http://news.ycombinator.com/

http://arstechnica.com/

http://tech.alltop.com/ -> news aggregator

http://www.technologyreview.com/

http://www.engadget.com/

http://www.wired.com/

http://techdirt.com/index.php

http://techcrunch.com/

TIPS >>

http://lifehacker.com/

http://www.howtogeek.com/

Forums

http://superuser.com/

http://stackoverflow.com/

and visit my bro's delicious @ http://delicious.com/thirumalaivelu

Pat(R)en(D)ting

Pat(R)en(D)ting - To be read as tRenD in Patenting

Google's patent on location based advertising is yet another jewel added to their crown. This is definitely a patent that others in to online advertising would crave for.

http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/03/01/google-location-ads/

I see a trend in patenting.... when an era (like touch phone, location based ad)is shaping up; more and more start ups are formed while the big companies do their part in R&D and later in to acquisition based on the investment they are going to be making in the future. Once the new era is sure to achieve greater heights, companies rush to get their work patented so as to secure a strong hold for themselves in the era and wish to be acclaimed as the champions of the era.

Although Facebook and Google may be happier with their news feed and location based ads patent recently, Apple must be thrilled with their numerous patents it has won over the multi touch interface.

Mesh networking

Intel is getting heat; not from it's processor but from NEC

NEC demo'd their new communication interface, that is powerful that the USB and the PCI express. Ofcourse Intel had something in the pipeline with their Light Peak interface, that is capable of speedups up to 10Gbps, however NEC's new interface as demo'd is capable of speeds up to 16Gbps, that means Intel has to push back on their interface? And what happens to the USB and PCI express?

http://www.pureoverclock.com/story4352.html

http://legitreviews.com/news/7410/

Windows Phone 7 series...What's in there?

For more:
http://gizmodo.com/5471805/windows-phone-7-series-everything-is-different-now

http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/15/windows-phone-7-series-hands-on-and-impressions/

C# lock, is it good to use?

Often .NET C# programmers are accustomed with writing the following code block:

lock(someObject)
{
/// code here...
}

But what happens when the compiler sees the above code? It simply emits the code below:















The above code guarantees that the lock is released i.e. the monitor is released no matter even an exception occurs within the try block. That means the data the code might be manipulating within the try block might be corrupted. And corrupted data is prone to more corruption when the program keeps proceeding further, this is really bad for the user. So it is better to use the below pattern,

Monitor.Enter()
/// your code here...
Monitor.Exit()

By doing this you are at least guaranteed that you prevent corruption of data and fail fast. Failing fast is good, you get to the root cause of the problem directly and fix it quicker.

Avoiding Lock is good not just because of the corruption of data scenario, code using "try, finally" is a perf hit. Remember try, catch, finally is an over-head unless it is used in the right place.

GMAIL to mock Twitter

Google could launch a Twitter-killer as soon as this week, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Google already allows Gmail users to update their status. The prompt reads, "let people know what you're up to, or share links to photos, videos, and Web pages." But every time a user updates their status, the previous update disappears into the ether.

The WSJ says the new feature will "allow Gmail users to view a stream of status updates from people they choose to connect with." It will be tightly integrated with Google's video-sharing site YouTube and its photo-sharing site Picasa.

Yahoo launched a very similar feature for its email service back in August 2009.

If Google is smart, these status updates will pour into and out of Facebook and Twitter. That way it will have an immediate install base of users already trained to update everyone they know about the latest thing they viewed, thought or ate.

Otherwise, it's hard to see how this feature won't end up as another in a long line of Google products that tried, and failed, to beat popular services from Web rivals (See Orkut versus MySpace, Google Video versus YouTube, Open Social versus Facebook Platform, Google Friend Connect versus Facebook Connect).

Touch patents!

Patents applied recently on the touch technology....every one is in a race to tout on their touch ;)

apple patent 1

apple patent 2

List of interesting touch patents from Apple, Microsoftetc

Interesting touch patents

Interesting reads:
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2008/02/multitouch_patents

Conversation with a doc

This is the snippet of the conversation that happened couple of hours ago today; it’s like people from two worlds having a conversation. OK now to the topic; I had to meet up with the doc as I was getting myself tested for blood sugar, cholesterol, blood pressure etc. as part of my health check routine for this year. [Pardon me for the informal language used.]

The doctor reading the report says that my glucose level is low, but not to worry I said OK, then she says your blood pressure is normal, but the systolic one is little higher but not to worry, I said OK. Then the doctor says your good cholesterol is higher than the normal but it is OK, I say OK. I quickly interrupted her, I see there are just 8-9 items in your list of checks and already 4 are out of the normal and you say not to worry...is this to make me feel better or is there is a bug with the machine generating report? What bug? The doc looks at me with a serious look...no…no I mean anything wrong with the machine? Nope she says and goes on….and then starts explaining her reasons. Did you eat food properly? Asks the doc and I said i had my breakfast but yet to take lunch. OK that's the reason the glucose is low, clarifies the doc. Then the doc says the good cholesterol when high is really good as it will be secreted to the liver blah blah blah... I said, what does that mean, the doc said it means it is good unlike the bad cholesterol. I was like that’s easy explanation hmmm waiting to hear more…but the doc kept quiet that the explanation she gave was enough. I asked her for further explanation to the cholesterol stuff, she said it simply means you will not get heart attack for a while. I thank her for the good news, but realized she kind off answered my question but not really. Then the doctor asked about my eating habits and about my exercise, I said i do not have the bandwidth to take care of them properly...with eyebrows up she asks...what do you mean by that? I am like there is no time for that stuff because I am busy and stuff…she looked again and asked nope the other word…you used some “bandwidth” blah blah.. What’s that? , I said we (IT) say that when you do not have enough room to do things…we call it bandwidth in our (IT) terminology. She did not seemed to be convinced and felt I was telling something that did not make sense….kindoff sensed that from her face. I then gave her examples where exactly we use and the terminology…she was like OK…hmmm whatever!

Writing a proposal to senior management

After a mind mapping exercise with a bunch of folks, we came up with the following order of things that we think are necessary for writing a good proposal to senior management.

1. Mission vs problem statement - If the problem is a well understood or a known issue then we can go after mission statement first followed by the problem statement. If not the order could be reversed.

2. Objective\goal\mission\problem statement

3. Solution or what we are going to do?

4. How does this idea fit the long term focus and vision of the company

5. Where are we going to market this?

6. What are the risks and their respective mitigation.

7. What are the competitor strategies and the approaches

8. What are the techniques\technology used to build

9. How many resources we need? What can be leveraged from the existing resources [Vendor companies involvement?]

10. What is the cost of implementation? ROI

11. Are there any proof of concepts? Product prototyping

12. What could be a likely schedule\dates?

13. Will there be any legal issues - say patents etc

14. Accountability

15. Product serviceability and road map - support too…

16. Pending risk.

References:
http://www.morebusiness.com/running_your_business/management/Drafting-Winning-Proposal.brc

http://contractscanada.gc.ca/en/writin-e.htm

http://www.nework.co.nz/SITE_Default/publications/articles/Writing_a_Proposal.asp

What to look for in a cloud service offering?

A complete cloud service offering should touch up on the below topics:

Voice: Marketing team
Addressee: Large, mid, small sized companies + developers in the companies

1. Overview - What is cloud according to you?
(since cloud is very subjective)
a. Vision

2. What are the current offerings? -
a. Solutions that we currently have
b. Services - Exchange, SQL server, Forefront
c. What are the requirements? large\mid\small customers…

3. Benefits to the customers

4. Return of Investment - Alternatives, Competitive pricing, saving X$ over
a year etc

5. Availability - SLA, scalability etc..

6. Security -
a. Partner cloud,
b. moving data on and off of the cloud,
c. accessing data in the cloud
d. Legislation act

7. Pricing -
a. Cost per usage
b. Service usage
c. Usage reports and billing model

8. More information:
a. Pilot programs
b. Case studies
c. Demos \ Training modules
d. Implementation cycle

9. Support:
a. Developer support - code and platform
b. Help desk
c. How Tos? Blogs? Faqs\communities.

10. Strategy:
a. Roadmap
b. Future

My requests for the next version of Windows - Win8 ?

1. App compatibility - The major issue for any Windows release is that App developed for one OS is for the most part needs to be re-compiled with changes suited to the new OS. How can this be minimized?

Note: Current Win7 version is still 6.1 to support multiple apps...

2. Restarting machine for security updates - Ther has seen tremendous improvements from the past, however further minimizing reboot requirements for every patch will be a welcome improvement.

3. App virtualization - Simplifying app virtualization on Windows will give customers running app in different environments a peace of mind.

4. IE security holes - ActiveX usage for accessing Windows native code from IE posses potential risk areas, which needs to be fixed asap...If not Google will do it in it's efforts towards Google native APIs on Chrome.

5. UAC - User Access Control - How does a normal user know when to say "Yes" or "No" to install a software or not? Why not Windows decide on the fly with some sort of hashing to determine if the software to be run is a malware or genuine one?

Note: There was some sort of Windows tracker, similar to Apple's App store that channelizes all the installations and updates, not sure of the status though!

Google adds apple(s)

Google adds apple(s) - What does Steve jobs have to say?

Has micro blogging pulled people off of regular blogs?

It is from my experience that I see my usage of Twitter has increased over blogging. It isn't necessarily bad, people get updates either ways. But personally the use of Twitter has reduced me from writing big posts on what I feel about Technology or business or anything for that matter. Do I miss things on what I would like to write? I don't know ;)

Have you guys noticed any change in your blogging behavior?

This rises the interesting question of blogging vs. micro blogging. To some they may be different for some it may be not.

PS. Yep you guessed it, obviously I cannot tweet this and hence had to post it here ;)

Fora TV

Found this lately, fora.tv. Good source for videos that you may be interested.