AfterTheDotNet

Software as a Service - The fundamentals

Ever since online software like Google Docs and Zoho have been introduced the threat to Microsoft and other developers of office suite software has increased. In fact the IT world has coined an new phrase for the online software which is "Software as a Service". According to Wikipedia "Software as a service (SaaS) is a software application delivery model where a software vendor develops a web-native software application and hosts and operates (either independently or through a third-party) the application for use by its customers over the Internet. Customers do not pay for owning the software itself but rather for using it"

SaaS was initially thought of as a low cost alternative for a business to gain access to commercially licensed software. However, that is not the case anymore and this amply clear from the launch and success of Windows live page and Office Live Free Website. Some of the areas where SaaS has been effective is Customer relationship management, Video Conferencing, Human Resources, Accounting and Email. SaaS is different than ASP (Application Service Provider) as in SaaS the focus is on what the customer wants and not what the application developer can deliver.The success of Salesforce.com, which started in 1999, and has 390,000 subscribers has proven that SaaS can be a successful model. In fact nearly all the major IT companies have staked claim to the space as observed by Rick McGee, vice president of SaaS strategy for IBM Global Services.

There are many reasons why SaaS model is a popular one. One of them is the cost and work associated with deploying a SaaS model software. The cost of migration to a new version of a Software is a big cost for corporates and usually results in delay of work. This is not the case in SaaS. In case of SaaS model the burden of software deployment, maintenance, and availability is that of the service provider which makes it easy for the company deploying it.

There is criticism of SaaS model and there are some rightful concerns. The biggest one being data security. A post at Rocket Matter does deal with these questions. In the end you have to careful as to who is offering the service and how secure is your data with them before subscribing to any given software.

Software as a Service model has caught my fancy for sure. It seems SaaS is practical as it has a strong revenue model. In days to come I will be writing more on SaaS. If you have any thoughts please share it with me.

My favorite and top blogs

I’m sure a lot of you do follow some blogs regularly. I must admit it has become addiction. Though I can survive a couple of days without reading the RSS feeds but after that I will get the withdrawal symptoms and the first indication is when I start feeling that the world is whizzing past me. Some blogs do outgrow me (though I would like to believe that I outgrew them) and after some time I have to go hunting around for more. This time I thought I will share them with my readers (even though they are imaginary but you know every now and then I have to feel that I’m the God’s gift to mankind ). I have been using Google Reader to subscribe to the RSS feeds of the blogs and I have no complaints except that once in a while you do need to read the feeds offline and that does not work very well for me with Google Reader (though they have built a feature for offline reading of posts but it takes ages for the reader to sync with the Google Reader. So here is the list I have created recently.

1. Angryblackbitch
2. Becker-Posner Blog
3. Click Opera
4. Cosmic Variance
5. Diary of Samuel Pepys
6. El Guapo in DC
7. Eurotrash
8. Go Fug Yourself
9. 1000 Difficult Lessons
10. In the Middle
11. Ironic Sans
12. Johnny I Hardly Knew You
13. Julia (Here be Hippogriffs)
14. Language Log
15. Matthew Yglesias
16. Midnight in Iraq
17. Ninapaley.com
18. Old Hag
19. Radio.Uruguay
20. Rootless Cosmopolitan
21. The Rest is Noise
22. The Smoking Gun
23. Under Odysseus

How about you guys letting me know your favorite blogs by commenting on this post

Manage your online MS Office documents at Google docs

Till Google docs came by it was not convenient to create, edit and store your office 2007 documents online. With a  reliable company backing Google docs (Google bashers please excuse) the security risk is considerably less. The good thing with Google docs is that development has not stopped. Upgrades and additional features are being added by the development team which makes the service more usable and also keeps people interested in the service since there is something new after a few days. Some of the new features are

• Google had added a presentation tool to the Google docs service. Now you can store the slides as PDF’s which can be used to recreate the presentation quickly later if needed online or offline! If you want to do a presentation offline you can do it by using the PDF’s saved in the presentation
• Deeper directory structure can be built. Earlier users were restricted as far as creating sub folders. This restriction has been removed (source Google docs blog).
• Renaming of folders and documents is possible now from the toolbar itself is a great improvement from earlier method where one had to go to the folder or the document to edit it.

• Forms is another feature which is very usable. Now you can create forms within Google docs and send it via an email to anyone. They won’t need to sign in, and they can respond directly from the email message or from an automatically generated web page. The responses are added to the spreadsheet automatically. In fact using Google gadgets one can put this on any website as well and maintain the form from there.

• DocSyncer is another tool which is a very usable and beneficial. Once you have a Google Docs account and you install DocSyncer after downloading it from here, DocSyncer searches your documents and desktop folder for office documents and automatically uploads them to your Google Docs account. In fact later it keeps syncing the desktop and ‘my documents’ folder so that you have the latest versions online. You can also choose which documents to sync and you can also add other directories and folders to the syncing queue. The tool is free to use. Similar tools can be found at OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs extension and OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs extension.

• Google has released a simple one-purpose application called Google Uploader that lets you upload multiple documents at once to a Google Docs account, as well as add right-click uploading options for all the document types accepted by the free online office suit. Earlier the same could be done by sending emails to your Google Docs account but restriction on size and types of file was there. Google Uploader is a simpler , effective tool, and it seems to work pretty quickly. Google Docs Uploader is a free download for Windows only and requires .NET Framework 2.0.

With these additional features Google Docs is good system to store files which you might need to access away from your computer. I’m certainly going to start using Google Docs as a backup for my MS Office files.

Search for free MP3’s on the Internet

Music listening is something that is used by most of the computer users because it transcends preference of OS, size or the power of the computer that you one uses. MP3 is the most used format for listening to music. MP3 playback is now supported by most home audio players and listening to MP3 on a handheld and mobile phones has also increased the usage of MP3.

MP3s are available on the Internet though some of them are illegal. Users with limited exposure to the Internet have a challenge in finding MP3 music on the Internet. The music industry has been trying hard to clamp down usage of unauthorized music and therefore for in some countries (I pity them) users cannot buy or download MP3’s from illegal servers like Pirate Bay or unauthorized Torrent servers and that has not made things any easier. However there are some MP3 search engines which are creditable. Some of the ones I recommend are

Seeqpod

Seeqpod is a MP3 search service that has been developed using complex search algorithms which help in finding MP3 songs on the Internet. You can find specific artists and listen to them play as you surf, share music with friends, even embed the tunes in your Web site or blog. Using the ‘discover’ button you can find music that has been discovered recently by users of Seeqpod. Now Seeqpod is Iphone compatible making it very easy to search music using Seeqpod and other services like Songza have developed applications that with the help of Seeqpod.

Beemp3

Beemp3 is an mp3 search engine which has 800 000 mp3 files in their search database and approximately 10 000 files are added daily.

MP3Realm

Mp3Realm is an evolving search engine focused distinctively on audio in Mp3 format. Mp3Realm also index’s lyrics, so you can sing along to your favorite songs.The speed of the download’s you find, will vary. This is because the files you download are not hosted by Mp3Realm servers, they are gathered from crawling the web. Mp3Realm hosts no mp3 files.

SkreemR

SkreemR is a search engine for locating audio files on the web. SkreemR crawls the Internet for audio tracks and then provides the information for you to listen, download, or find out more about audio that you are interested in.

One neat SkreemR feature is the built-in music player that lets you preview a song before downloading it. It’s also interesting that you can rate search results. This might come in handy for filtering out junk audio files. . SkreemR wants to launch you into the Internet music community.

These search engines would help you find a MP3 file if it exists on the Internet. Be warned though that since these search engine don not host the files they do not take responsibility of the genuine of the MP3’s which you find and download using them. Therefore ensure that the MP3 you are downloading is legal.

There are some other services which people use to listen to music like Pandora or Last.fm. Some geeks have tutorials on how to search for MP3 using a Google as well. In the end you need to insure that you are not doing something illegal and once you assure that then it is happy listening to you.

Best web applications of 2007

As the year comes to an end one is tempted to find out the top web apps for the year. This is not easy to do so because of the number of applications that are being released every day. Once you have your list of top web apps then you want to compare the results what others are saying.

I decided to list the top 5-8 web applications which have been the most useful to me in 2007. I knew that the biggest problem was that there were web applications which are great but I have not tried them even though I signed up for them but never got to test them for the want of time. Nevertheless here is my list

1. Google apps for your domain and Google web apps
   I have been using Google for your domain for my office and it has been a big time saver and has made management of email accounts, documents, chat and scheduling much easier. Google apps include Google docs, Gmail, start page for your domain, Google calendar and the API’s of Google for your domain include Gmail, start page, The biggest advantage is there is a small learning curve as the Google web applications work similar to the offline applications.
2. Opera for my Mobile
   I have a Sony Erricson W700i and the web browser Opera has been a boon for me as now I can check emails, information and also chat using Opera on my mobile. The interface of Opera is very easy to use and their latest version is a big improvement.
3. Delicious
   I started using Del.icio.us at the end of 2006 though I was not using (or abusing it!) till February 2007 because that was the time I discovered the extensions for Firefox. Bookmarking has become interesting and doable because delicious stores the bookmarks online. The fact that everyone shares the bookmarks helps in finding useful sites which you might not find otherwise through regular search engines or browsing. At times instead of searching on the search engines I conduct searches on delicious and invariabily, though the results are far less, the results have some good and interesting links.
4. Wordpress and blogging 
   Wordpress exposed me to the world of blogging and I find sharing of thoughts on a blog very satisfying and fun. Now I’m not restricted to wordpress as now I have 5 regular blogs - one of them on Tumblr (http://www.palimadra.tunblr.com), two of them on blogger, then my personal journal at http://www.afterthe.net/journal and the last one on my business’s official site. While blogging one learns a lot about the nuances of web designing and how the Internet works while keeping in touch with your points of Interest. Once you have the blog up and running one has understand how to market it and that exposes you to the real time challenges of Internet marketing.
5. Lifehacker and Personal Productivity
   Lifehacker (http://www.lifehacker.com and http://lifehack.org) has enabled me to see personal productivity from a different perspective. It is satisfying to know that other people in the world have similar problems as you and some of them are able to tackle it. Lifehacker has helped me understand myself better and also has assisted in developing different perspectives to everything in life and I’m sure would continue to do so for the rest of my life.
6. Box
   Online backup of documents had a new meaning for me. Thanks to the team at Box.net for giving me  a free account on their site where I could store my documents online. With the improved integration with Microsoft Office storing documents has become easier and the obvious thing to do.
7. Youtube
   I know a lot of people would frown on inclusion of YouTube to my list of favorites. I feel the vertical has not developed fully and it is still evolving. However, I’m sure in the years to come this would take the shape of TV on demand. Everyone, I feel, would agree changed the way video was used in one’s life and has made video format more shareable.
8. Google Analytics
   Though I’m still learning the tricks of the trade Google Analytics has added a whole new dimension  to  the areas of SEO, SEM and Internet marketing and exciting as one can measure the results from the intuitive interface of Google Analytics.

Once I had prepared a list of my best web applications I looked up to see what others were saying. There were analysis done by some of the industry observers and authorities in certain verticals. As I had expected they were very different from those on my list. Some of the links I studied were

1. http://lifehacker.com/software/lifehacker-top-10/top-10-new-and-improved-apps-of-2007-332617.php
2. http://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/11-top-new-web-apps-of-2007.html
3. http://www.investintech.com/resources/blog/archives/78-Popular-Desktop-Apps-And-Their-Online-Alternatives.html : A must read for those who have not viewed the post. Some great alternatives to offline applications.
4. http://socialmediatrader.com/115-social-news-and-bookmark-sites-rated-by-page-rank-inbound-links-and-value/

Please share your list and help people to discover services or web applications you use as this would be a good reward to those who have developed them.

Note taking made easy

One of the toughest things to do consistently is note taking. The first challenge is how to take notes. While some people prefer contemporary method of using pen and paper. This method has its own advantage but the challenge is maintaining speed. More and more students are using a computer to do their daily tasks they are not able to develop good speed in writing and that leads to frustrations because of not being able to maintain speed while taking notes. For those who are comfortable this is a great way to make notes. If you want to use preformatted pages for taking notes then the application at pocketmod is a great tool to print sheets to take notes.

The second option is to use take notes using a software. There are a lot of shareware and freeware softwares available. If you have too much money then you can buy the shareware listed at download.com and if you are like me who hates to spend on purchasing software go through the reviews of note taking freeware for windows below and decide which one is best for you.

Scribbleit

Scibbleit is a windows based software and has been developed by JMK software and is easy to use program to manage your ideas and thoughts. Each note can contain a title, a message, time, date and an URL. Other features available are browsing through your messages, mailing a message, setting an alarm for every message, sorting your messages and more.

SimBust Note Manager

SimBust Note Manager is a simple yet robust application that allows you to easily edit, view, and organize various types of information — notes, memos, thoughts, code snippets, logs, etc. All the files can be password protected. You can also export to and import from text files. The interface is very similar to windows explorer and has three panes.Its stealthy folder key scheme, in addition to the typical file password, is especially suited for keeping confidential data, such as diaries or passwords.  Another features is that you can run this application from a thumb drive if you do not want to mess up the registries.

Essential PIM

EssentialPIM Free is the award-winning, personal information freeware which is supported by a large community of users, EPIM has been widely acknowledged as the best personal information management system on any desktop or USB flash. Since the interface is very easy EssentialPIM is regarded as a world leader in visual appointment and information systems area. Some of the features of Essential PIM are

• Tools to satisfy your calendar, contact management, to do list and notes needs.
• Synchronization with Outlook, Windows Mobile devices, Palm, iPOD, Google Calendar.
• Simple printout of any or all modules and quick export of your data into the most useful formats.
• Strong data protection using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm.
• Intuitive interface in many languages.

Debrief Notes

Debrief® is PC software by Idealign® to assist you in making quick notes. If you are one of those who cannot get around to making notes then Debrief is for you as you can have shortcuts for typing and have notes at one place. With mouse clicks you can make general daily notes, meetings, to-dos, assignments, issues, changes, risks, decisions, research, contacts, and more.

There are three editions

1. Basic Edition: Basic notes, subject folders, daily notepad. The Basic Edition is no charge.
2. Standard Edition: More robust note features, debriefs, views, reports, export formats, categories.
3. Professional Edition: Additional contexts for tasks, cases, contact management, library, index, outlines, note decks. Plus reminders, privacy passwords, accounts, deadlines. And more.

The features of the advance version are great but the price is a discouragement.

Treepad

TreePad™ is an Personal Information Manager, Organizer, Database, and Word Processor. It is easy and intuitive to use  and saves you time allowing you to keep your notes, documents, hyperlinks and images at the brief distance of a click. TreePad™ allows you to enjoy better access, organization and control over all your data, notes, bills, projects, clients, addresses, letters, speeches, research, collections, classroom notes, Web pages, links, bibliographic listings, and whatever else your creativity enables you to entrust TreePad™ with, for good organization, easy access, and safe storage.

Treepad can be run from a external disk (such as: USB disk, pen drive, thumb drive, flash drive, memory stick, etc.) without installing it on your hard drive.

Keynote

Though support and development of Keynote has been suspended but even today it is hand solution for note taking. This freeware has the following features

1. Store many separate notes within one file
2. Tree type notes which can be arranged
3. Ability to create user-defined styles
4. Convenient keyboard shortcuts
5. Configurable activation hotkey
6. Integration with WordWeb,
7. You can protect your data files with secure encryption

Keynote is my personal favorite and would recommend it to those who do not take notes but want to start doing that. Please share what method you use to make and notes on a computer or the good old pen and paper fashion.

Hack your Firefox

Firefox is Internet browser which can be used by geeks and standard users. Ever since Internet Explorer 7 was released some of the users have complained about Firefox being resource intensive than Internet Explorer and at times Firefox freezes or shut downs suddenly which is bugging. However, apart from these issues there is no other major issue and the amount of customization available in Firefox makes it a winner in the browser war.

There are some tweaks that can make your surfing experience richer when using Firefox. To customize Firefox you need to change some entries in the advance configuration. Do not get intimidated by the word "advance configuration" it is nothing but a long list of keys and values which can be accessed by typing about:config in the address bar of Firefox. Some of the tweaks which I use are

Limit RAM usage: Since Firefox uses a lot of memory specially if you have been surfing for a long time in the same window this tweak is necessary to improve your browsing experience. Type about:config in the address bar and you would see a list of keys (preference), status (user has set it or the status is default), type (type of value, whether boolean, string or an integer) and their values on the screen. Look for browser.cache.disk.capacity  or browser.cache.memory.capacity preference. This command sets the maximum amount of RAM Firefox should use. The value is an integer which has to be changed depending on the RAM available on your computer. For systems with RAM of upto 512 MB you should start with 5000 and for systems with RAM of more than 512 MB start with the 15000 as the value. Use the browser for some time to determine whether the amount of RAM allocated does not affect the browsing experience. If it does change the value to something higher.

Speed up page loading: Once you have the "about:config" window open look for network.http.pipelining, network.http.proxy.pipelining and network.http.pipelining.maxrequests. Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. The network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining would typically be false. Change the value to true (by double clicking) to enable pipelining so that Firefox can send many requests to a web page at a time thus loading pages faster. Look for the value of network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and change it to 30 which allows Firefox to send more requests again helping pages to load faster.

Fetch only pages that you click: Some of the pages, most of them on Google for example, fetch content for those links which it thinks you are most likely to click. This takes up resources of your computer and also the bandwidth. The setting can be changed by looking for network.prefetch-next value and changing the value to false by double clicking. This would stop pages from pulling content from those links which have not been clicked thus reducing resource usage.

These three tricks are the most common and are easy to implement. If you are one of those who would like to go further I would recommend using this link for a complete knowledge of all the keys that are listed on http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQs_:_About:config_Entries   in the about:config window.

Help the poor when using the Internet

The developers of ripple.org came out with this brilliant idea of monetizing what people do the most on the Internet and donating the proceeds to charity. Ripple is very easy to use. Ripple is a search engine like Google and as soon as you conduct a search using ripple funds are generated by providing advertisement

(like Google does on the right hand side of the results page) and these funds are forwarded to charities. As long as the search results are good it is a win win situation for everyone and I’m sure as ripple gets popular lots of funds can be generated.

There are two distinct ways to generate funds. On the home page at http://www.ripple.org there is a image which is divided into sections. The sections are water, food, education and money. Clicking on either of the images generates some revenue, as clicking takes you to the advertisements of the various sponsors, which is used for a specific cause. The causes are water - gives 6 days access to clean water to those who do not have it, clicking on food would help a village feed itself, education would give access to 2 days of education to the poor and the money link would help finance a $100 loan to poor.

The second option is to use the ripple search engine which is a Google coop driven search engine for search on the Internet. Extensions for Firefox and Internet Explorer are available as well which you can use to search without using the Ripple’s website. You can also use Ripple’s buttons on your website which the visitors can use to generate funds. Right now the charities that are supported are Australian but I’m sure in times to come they would be international charities as well.