Google Wave Invitation

Will I be the lucky 1 of 1,00,000 Google Wave  invitation? I have registered myself on the first day itself. 

Keeping my finger crossed.

is hakia the next wikipedia?

The way hakia  is organizing data reminds me whether it is next wikipedia ?

What does wikipedia do?

Wikipedia is an online repository of crowdsourced data which is edited by editors.

it is repository, users create on wikipedia servers.

what hakia is doing?

it is labeling the sites credible for its contents on a topic. Instead of storing all data on its server, it classify them and educate the users which site is worth referring. here also flagging the sites as credible is done by hakia editors as in wikipedia.

Can we think then hakia as distributed version of wikipedia?

Another product which comes close to hakia is Google scholar. Google scholar  also helps us searching scholarly papers and it is distributed as well but Google do not have editorial control and its content source is not wide.

Different flavors of search engine

A search engine, when it launches its operation, we compare it with google and treat it as another google clone, but soon it finds a niche. 

Like WolframAlpha , bing, hakia, hunch, cuil, Yebol. As it is clear now, most of them has found or slowly finding their niche. 

WolframAlpha  is certainly not a search engine. it is a computation engine as they say. it provides us with structured data like google squared  but wolframAlpha is much more vast and robust. it is the future of search results, how we want our search answers to be. It should also display unstructured results where it can't compute instead of a blank page.

Bing  is a decision engine(they say) and is a bit different from google  as it provides a snapshot of results after you search which provides ease of use and also its interface is a bit cheeky.

hakia  is structuring the web on the subject level and indexing the credible site with the help of editors -some sort of distributed wikipedia  powered with search.

hunch  theme and motto - promising Yes, implementation wise still it has a long way to go. I am still to find out how to make it work for me.

cuil  and yebol  still jumping the ships, yet to find a niche, i would say. 

GMail outage - Lessons to be learnt

In recent times, we had several outages of facebook, twitter, rackspace and yesterday night of Gmail . Yesterday, in a blog post , Im mentioned the need of a Google search appliance like product of Google apps for enterprise. Zoho has done it. These service outage reinforces the need and offering gaps in existing market. Enterprises can't depend on the Google SLA of 99.9% uptime. Only local servers can provide the mission critical applications, when required. 

Wake up Google, rise up to market needs

Zoho - right way to go

In the office productivity tools space, there is a gap between cloud based solutions(google apps, zoho etc.) and desktop solutions. How much ubiquitous is cloud, it can't replace the ease of use, control and data security of desktop solutions. certainly the terms "ease of use", "control" and "data security" can be interpreted in more than one way for cloud based apps and desktop apps. zoho  with the latest initiative  filled this gap only. It will foster more growth and more traction. 

There is always a need for Google search appliance kind of products in the enterprise office productivity space.