Weekend Blues !!

Although my weekend's getting screwed here working at office, but then there a lot more things that can be done normally on a weekend. Tough to locate what's on in the happening pubs in the city, or any live band or a special event scheduled in one of the clubs? Well, down2night comes to the rescue here. I hate to term it as a social networkin' site(damn, thats a sickenin' term now), but then thats what it is, but then the 'social' tag here is much more relevant.. at last!

Down2Night is a web application that allows users to subscribe to their favorite nightlife venues and receive SMS text message alerts about events happening on the nights that interest them most, effectively, giving viable options to the all important question: "What are we doing tonight?"

Features include:
- "Subscribe" are the venues you would like to know about.
- "Your Notifications" are the days of the week you will be notified of your subscribed spot/venue.
- "Whats Down" is a dynamic menu of the event/ promotion lists by each venue.
- "I'm Down" user powered ranking of events at individual locations.
- "Event" allows the user/venue to input an events/promotions at that particular spot.
- "Browse" enables you to search by pre-selected criteria ie: My Spots, Most Popular and All.
- "Search" live search of venues.
- "Next" at the bottom of the page moves you to the next page of venues.

Currently, this service is available for the folks living in San Francisco, Seattle and Tri Cities, but plans are underway to launch the same in New York City, Las Vegas, Boston, Austin, Madison, Miami, Denver, Portland, Vancouver, Chicago, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Houston.

Interestin' concept though.. Further, other relevant information is provided for locating the venues in form of mashups.

Damn, I hope these folks go global soon rather than merely concentrating on the Big Sam!

Microsoft hit yet again!

Microsoft Corp definitely isn't having the best of weeks. First the news of Google Apps going pro is a huge concern for them, and now a federal jury in San Diego has ordered Microsoft to pay $1.5 billion to Alcatel-Lucent in a patent dispute over MP3 audio technology used in Windows.

In its verdict, the jury took into the account all the Windows PCs sold since May 2003. This entire episode can have some serious repurcussions as Alcatel-Lucent might now seek royalties from the other technology companies like Apple, Intel and Texas Instruments. Read the detailed coverage with the representatives of either parties here at TechBridge.

VVrroooooooommmmmmmm!!

A stunner of a video that I came across on the God of car videos - StreetFire. Well, without wastin' much time.. check this Bugatti Veyron burning the streets. Keep the headphones on.. its better than the sound of music!! :D

Its the GOOGs again..

The secret now finally has open with Google announcing that it will charge a fee of $50 for its online suite of software that includes e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and calendar management. Labelled as Google Apps Premier Edition, it provides a 10 GB / account for emails and 99.9% uptime guarantee for the same. So the advantage offered above its free edition is a 5 fold increase of the email storage capacity. Further, it also provides APIs to integrate with your existing infrastructure - i.e. Organizations that already maintain a user directory can use the Google Apps Premier Edition APIs to automatically keep their user accounts in sync across systems. Now that is a huge plus that comes for the $50 prices that you pay.

The timing however, perhaps couldn't have been better, with Microsoft Corp. spending a fortune trying to persuade even the animals(damn.. k its an exaggeration) to buy their Vista edition with the revamped Outlook (personally I didn't like it though) et al.

However, documents and applications making use of online storage are yet to generate mass acceptance because they entail with them a huge dependability factor - the availability of internet. With memory getting cheaper by the hour, the only advantage that online storage provides is that they are accessible from almost any location - provided you've got the 3 w's runnin'..

Required --- GUI Designers for Yahoo! ;)

I was trying to get an update on what's been on off late on the super sublime world of web, and came across some stunning criticism of Yahoo's new read-vote-submit system in place for their suggestion board. Well, on the first look it does look strikingly similar to Digg and yeah, at once I wondered what Yahoo was upto. Yeah, I do understand that Digg doesn't hold a patent to their system and there must be a zillion websites employing the same technique. But then, Yahoo ain't just another one of those zillion ones.

However on another thought, I wondered if this criticism was really asked for. Yahoo is not putting this system in place for polling for stories from the web.. rather, its just used for folks who visit their suggestion board, where the suggestions are marked by their popularity. Now that ain't a crime..

The only potential problem that I felt was the user interface presented by Yahoo. Now I have been workin' as a software engineer for almost 3 yrs, and have seen this fact - no matter what code goes in the backend, but the questions are raised on the interface designers, coz thats precisely whats visible to the end user. Now, although the algorithm, design, blah blah used by Yahoo might be strikingly different (perhaps better) from that of Digg, but damn.. the interface is so similar. Its just a 'another_template' version of Digg. This really forces me to wonder, what were their GUI designers doing, or probably too inspired with Digg.. In that case, its a compliment to the Digg Developers.. :D