31
Aug 2010

What I need is a Hierarchical Inbox not a Priority Inbox

People tell us all that time that they’re getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean—here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, we’re happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta)—an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail.

First off, I only use gmail for my personal account. I could not care less about priority there, I hardly get any important email there and the mail I get there can wait.
The most critical inbox is my work inbox. Gmail does not support IMAP (to access other emails) and my work does not support POP3. So cannot use the gmail features for work anyways.
However, if I needed an improvement in my work Inbox, its to do with prioritizing by management and team hierarchy.
I need a tree view of emails from my tech leads, my developers across shores, my boss, my vp, my bosses peer, my vps peer, mails where my boss is copied, mails where my vp is copied, mails from my project manager, from my project managers peers. You see where I am going.
There is no need for extra smartness, the above is what I need. I still cannot get.
Can I not set rules to achieve the above? Sure I can but I don't want to, thats manual. All the above hierarchy is available with an API, this structuring can be automated without the need to set rules.

30
Aug 2010

San Jose Unified's online school a first in the Bay Area

Liberty Online, which may be the first district-sponsored virtual public school in the Bay Area. There are no classrooms, just students at home, and full-fledged San Jose Unified teachers monitoring via the Web. San Jose Unified's newest school is aimed at students like Matt -- independent learners who don't thrive in traditional schools.

This is an interesting trend to watch. Scott McNealy (http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_15902614) and Bill Gates ( http://money.cnn.com/2010/08/23/technology/sal_khan_academy.fortune/index.htm ) both pushing their vision of online education is definitely worthwhile to notice.

14
Aug 2010

Real estate search within a school district

The integration of education data in Redfin's real estate service is more than skin deep, as each school is now profiled on the site, with basic facts and even parent's reviews. According to Redfin's blog, the service will even soon let you search for homes within a specific district, a big deal for some families.

When parents are searching for homes, finding a home in a good school district is very painful. None of the real estate web solutions including redfin do a great job of letting you search based on schools you like, school rating etc. They do show schools around the house but that information is not necessarily true as right now its based of the zip code and school zoning is much more complicated.

When looking around for such solutions, came across Maponics and their effort to collect school zoning data across the US and already in deals with realtor.com and I am sure with others to use their API and database (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Move-Network-to-Feature-bw-1750251488.html?x=0&...).

Now this redfin update (h/t @louisgray) makes me believe we are much close to this type of solution though I hope its not display only information that is not searchable.

13
Aug 2010

USPS, Short Addresses and EarthClassMail

Couple of years back (4 to be exact), a buddy and I were talking about product ideas. One of the things we talked was how to shorten the USPS mailing addresses. Today I saw a conversation on twitter that was jokingly talking about using bit.ly to shorten the mailing address. This reminded me that this problem has not been solved that.

So how did we want to solve this? We wanted to solve this by sending postal mail using email address, thats it. Users register their email address with usps, usps sends confirmation to physical address and after confirmation all is set. Senders simply use email address to post anything to you. Is there a spam problem, sure there is but thats already there and there has to be additional protections to ensure that it does not become un-manageable.

Even better, USPS should buy Earth Class Mail  and digitize all our snail mail by default. This might be their saving point.

 

 

 

12
Aug 2010

Instantly zap links, maps and phone numbers to your iPhone

So by now all you smartphone nerds have seen todays Google's announcement of Chrome To Phone, if not read up here

I have been following up this story whole morning on bloggers reactions etc. I was surprised to see no one mention that iPhone has some apps that do something similar. I know I have installed few before. So I kept wondering while at work why have those apps not come up, especially its become the favorite pastime to compare the iPhone with Android. I just back home and started playing with the iPhone apps and here is what I found out.

  1. Pastefire:  If you copy text (url, phone number, text message etc) into the "copy zone" and hit send, it uses push notification to launch the app and automatically do the appropriate action (call the phone number, sms, launch the browser). There is a setting in the iPhone app to say auto execute the best command for the text pattern. Really cool for calling numbers etc. However, whats not cool about is that the concept of 'copy zone' which expects you to copy the text there. A browser extension would pretty much put it in the same position as 'Chrome To Phone' Android feature. How about that? An app doing that what Android is claiming to be its OS feature. Reading up the Appsfire blog, it seems like they thought about this but hoping some developer pick this up. It makes me believe we will see this soon after todays Android announcement
  2. MyPhoneDesktop: I have had Pastefire for a while but today I discovered MyPhoneDesktop. Its simply awesome. In the browser or in its native desktop app, type in a phone number, url, text etc and click the appropriate button voila the action is performed on your phone (again via push notifications). Here is the kicker, lets say you want to launch an app in your iphone like flickr, all you do is type flickr:// (maps://, pastefire:// etc) and hit open url, boom the app launches in your iPhone. However this launch mechanism for an app to work, the app should have coded it in to handle the incoming url. Again MyPhoneDesktop falls short of the Chrome To Phone feature by having to past information its in own UI integrating to a browser extension pretty much exceeds what the 'Chrome To Phone' feature does.

 

10
Aug 2010

Conflict of interest

The agreement outsources the FCC's powers and authorities to the very industries these rules are supposed to oversee." Having Verizon and Google make rules about the Web is comparable to having Ford or GM makes rules about auto safety.

This statement says it all. It angers me that Google and Verizon dare to portray that they have no business intentions behind this when all the loop holes in the proposal point otherwise. More importantly what the f is private internet, there is only one internet wired/wireless, separating them is opposite of net neutrality.

10
Aug 2010

Evernote's data redundancy and transparency

Every user’s data is stored on a “shard”. A shard is made up of a server together with a redundant fail-over server. If there is any problem with a server, the system automatically fails over to the second server in the shard. We currently have 37 shards. Shard 22 was the one that had problems last month. The data in each server is stored on a RAID 1 (fully redundant) array. All data is also backed up on-site and off-site. A full copy of your notes are also stored on the Windows and Mac clients (and the iPhone and iPad clients for Premium users who enable that option). This means that every note in Evernote is stored in at least six redundant locations: the disk on the primary server, the RAID mirror, the fail-over server on the shard and it’s RAID mirror, the on-site backup and the offsite backup. Most users also have another one or two full copies on their local clients. This makes data loss in Evernote extremely rare.

Hats off to evernote for being so transparent on what the actual problem is, the underlying design and what they are doing to make sure it does not happen. It feels good that my notes are backed up on 6 redundant locations.
I am considering going premium!

02
Aug 2010

Hyperion LCM Utility Prezo by Ranzal

@Oracle I manage the developer of EPM Lifecycle Management. In layman terms LCM is an export/import tool with ability to audit, automate and create a workflow. Though the complexity comes with the number of products in the EPM system and their diverse application artifacts. When developing EPM LCM, we strived to achieve uniformity and simplicity in enabling export/import of many EPM products. Ranzal consultants (http://ranzal.com/) help our customers utilize LCM to achieve application artifact movement between dev,test and product. They have done an excellent presentation for ODTUG on Hyperion LCM implementation recommendations. I am looking forward to meeting them later this month to learn their experiences, understand the items that they see the most pressing and overall figure out how to improve the LCM.

 

28
Jul 2010

Wikileaks To Leak 5000 Open Source Java Projects With All That Private/Final Bullshit Removed

EYJAFJÖLL, ICELAND — Java programmers around the globe are in a panic today over a Wikileaks press release issued at 8:15am GMT. Wikileaks announced that they will re-release the source code for thousands of Open Source Java projects, making all access modifiers 'public' and all classes and members non-'final'.

 

ROTFL !
Full Disclosure, been a Java developer for god knows how long!

h/t @greenisus

28
Jul 2010

Dell Streak

5-inch 3G tablet for $549. Goodluck finding buyers for that.