Elections 09: Innovation in Campaigning

Loksatta, a regional party of Andhra Pradesh led by bureaucrat turned politician Jaya Prakash Narayanan who earlier led the Loksatta movement. Loksatta is contesting the elections with Zero corruption as main agenda. Loksatta is first political party to have created orkut application.
Yesterday, Loksatta distrubuted currency notes to people as part of its campaigning. Wondering how can a party with zero corruption as sole agenda is distribution currency? Well its a currency of Zero value :). Yes, its a currency with zero value which has message as "I promise to ensure that I will neither take nor give bribes".
In another novel method to reach to voters JP on friday launched his election campaign by train. The Former IAS officer and his supporters are travlleing in general compartment of Secundrabad-Nellore Krishna express. Which will take them to 25 constituencies of 7 districts in record 24 hours. Addressing people at various railway stations he said he wanted to change the politics which is currently dominated by currency and muscle power. This campaign has cost them just few thousands whereas other political parties are spending millions of rupees on campaigning.
Kudos to JP and all the best Loksatta for Elections-09

Tech Talk: Web Security

Check out this presentation on web security:

Security Tech Talk

View more presentations from mallik_y2k2.

Elections 2009: BJP's IT Vision

BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) is counting a lot on youth in this election and in process is wooing the youth with its IT vision.

Highlights of BJP's IT Vision

• 1.2 crore IT enabled jobs in rural areas
• 1 crore students to get laptops at Rs:10K
• Promotion of IT in Indian languages
• Broadband (2 Mbps) at cost of 200rs/month
• MNIC(multipurpose national identification card for all citizens in 3 years)
• Corruption free India using IT and making all govt offices in India paper free.
• Number of mobile subscribers to reach 100 crores in 5 years
• Video conferencing to be made affordable and easily accessible
• Bank accounts for all Indians
• Each family below poverty line to get a smart phone.
  

While this Vision is great achieving it will be real challenge. But its good to see political parties are atleast planning to start using technology for betterment of India. Advaniji, but giving away smart phones to BPL families doesn't make much sense and would be better to concentrate on how to bring these families above poverty line. Giving away Smart phones sounds like the free color TV scheme from some of south indian regional parties like TDP, DMK. Anyways, great vision and all the best advaniji for 2009 elections. Lets hope to see an oldie PM with youngie outlook.

How to post invisible scraps in orkut?

Recently I found this interesting feature (or bug) in orkut.

I could send a scrap to my friend which is invisible to my friend and me.

You could ask me then what's the use of that?
The receiver gets a popup saying that vivek had scrapped you "nothing", and when the user checks his scrapbook he finds nothing there (no scrap from vivek).

What I had done was I had posted a scrap with html content with image embedded. I have picked the html content from a social image bookmarking app Picso
Looks like orkut thought it might be spam and deleted my scrap with out intimating me :(.

What could have happened?
1. When I scrapped my friend orkut accepted my scrap with a small captcha.
2. Trigged by this event popup notifier created a noticiation event.
3. After an hour the spam prevention engine of orkut had woke up and saw my scrap, as it is not intilleginet enough, it thought my scrap as a spam and deleted that from my friends scrapbook :(.


Now I am using this to send invisible scraps to my friends. Its fun try it out yourself.
pick any image of your choice and try it out


I expected the scrap to be as follows



Picso - Mazic India

Google Promotes Youtube Video Downloads!!

Piracy has always been associated with Youtube. Media majors have filed lawsuits against Google for their copyrighted content being hosted on Youtube. Some of recent judgments have been in favor of video sites where the video hosting sites pleaded its defense under the “safe harbor” provisions of DMCA copyright law, which meant it could be safe as long as it removed the infringing video when alerted by the copyright holder.
But what if a video hosted on youtube is downloaded by some user even before an alert by copyrighed holder? Many sites like this exists all over the internet which allows users to download Youtube videos. Google cant control those sites so its ok but Google went ahead and accepted an application named Youtube Video Downloader for its Orkut social network. At the first point this application doesn't have any social feature, one of our app was rejected few months back stating it didnt have any social features. Most important being how can Google accept such application which is allowing download of videos from one of their sites. If Google thinks there is no problem with this then why dont they just give download link on the youtube video page itself.
Is "Be Evil" Google's new mantra? What will be copyrighted content holders take on this?
Will Orkut remove this Application?

Google's Explaination on Flagging all the Sites as Malware sites

Google gave official explanation about yesterday's bug where Google flagged all the search results as malware. It wasn't a code push that actually caused the issue, but its a data push. Google maintains all the URL which are considered malware in a file. The URLs in this file are updated both manually and in automated way.
Yesterday the new version of this file was pushed to servers and the file contained '/' as one URL which is like * in the regular expression and so all the sites were listed as malware. Great that team was able to identify this issue soon and revert back the URLs file.
But the question remains is how did '/' get into the URLs list. It can be either manual error or bug in automated malware URL detecting code. Google claims it as a manual error and for that matter any tech company in such a scenario would not admit it as bug in the code. But how can a human whose daily job is to update these URL be unaware that entering '/' would mean all the URLs or is he some disgruntled employee who got pink slip recently?
Now will ecommerce sites like e-bay or amazon sue Google as they may have definitely made losses during this 55 minutes where there site have been shown as malware sites?

Stop Writing in Toilets and Start Testing

After few recent incidents, I feel that all the Google testers are busy writing on the toilets (Read about Testing on the Toilet) and forgot testing the software. I would request them to please concentrate on testing software and not to just claim themselves as best testing/QA team of the world. Google definitely have some of best testers who helped build world class web applications, but quality soon seems to be deteriorating.
First, it was the security loop holes in Google's Chrome browser which surprised me. Just an hour back Google Search started showing all the results as malware sites,which may harm you computer. This lasted for about 15 minutes. On lighter side, Google may be trying to show all non-sponsored results as malware so users will end up with no option but to click on sponsored ads.
One more issue on orkut, I was trying to submit an orkut app from couple of days with no success using this url. I am constantly getting message as:
Bad, bad server. No donut for you.
Unfortunately, the orkut.com server has acted out in an unexpected way. Hopefully, it will return to its helpful self if you try again in a few minutes.
There was no response from them even for an email. Lets see how long this will remain.

What do you guys feel? Is Google slowly losing on the Quality front?

SMS Apps From Mazic Using SMSGupShup Platform

SMS GupShup (Webaroo company) has released its platform for developers to build their SMS applications. The platform is very easy to use. SMS Application is an application that can be used to provide services by communicating through SMS. It can be built using any programming language like Java, C, C++, Perl, PHP, Python etc. You need to register, a Keyword and Appurl with Sms GupShup. When any user send an SMS Keyword Query, the app url will be getting the user phone number and Query as the Query parameters. The response from the app url should be in form of XML or JSON which contains the phone number and content to be posted to the phone number. App cannot send infinite outgoing responses. The outgoing responses from the an app can be upto 5 times the incoming messeges.
Mazic India has built couple of SMS apps using this platform, SMS Dictionary and SMS News.
SMS Dictionary:
SMS DICT pasta and sends it to 56767888 to get meaning of Pasta as response. Usage: DICT Query

SMS News:
SMS Khabar Satyam to 56767888 to get latest news related to satyam. Usage: KHABAR Query

Let us know what kind of services you would like to access via SMS.

BJP's Online Campaign For Elections

Politicians keen to build their online presence during the election year. After Lalu, Advani started his blog, not just the blog but a complete website highlighting LKAdvani and BJP. Today when I opened my blog I saw Advani's pics and it was actually an ad for lkadvani.in. So BJP's IT team has not just build the site but they are marketing it as well on Google Adsense. Congress too has its website, which is being kept updated except for the home page which is still congratulating Sonia Gandhi for 2004 elections win :D. We may soon see even Congress ads on adsense. Searching for Sonia Gandhi in Google gives lkadvani's ad on right side with content as Advani, a better leader and BJP a better party. BJP teams seems to have done their ground work and have bid for appropriate words.
PS: After this post, i think you will see advaniji's ad on my blog for sometime.

Carol Bartz is New Yahoo CEO!! Whats in Store?

Carol Bartz is named as new Yahoo CEO. Carol is ex-CEO of Autodesk. She was with autodesk for 14 years. AutoDesk is a traditional software company building CAD related software and selling it to customers. Yahoo is free online web business with ads as revenue model. So, both the businesses are not similar. It interesting to see how Carol handles this.
Micrsoft is a great software product company, which builds the operating system and sells it (Autodesk type), but its struggling to make a mark in online business (Yahoo type). Lets see whats in store for Yahoo?
All the best Carol Bratz

Save Satyam!!

Employees are the biggest asset for any IT services company, and at this point for Satyam to continue its business, it needs the support of its employees. We already have a job market crisis and freshers are seriously affected, we don't want 50K experienced employees to enter the job market now. Only way this can be avoided is by rebuilding Satyam. Nasscom has already asked other companies not to poach the employees from Satyam. Prior to this Infosys has asked the HR not to poach the employees from Satyam. I feel other companies should start hiring if satyam laysoff, but not poach at this crisis situation. Infosys may have asked to refrain from poaching Satyam employees with just this in mind.
Pluggd.in has posted an article stating that this show Infosys double standard. The article and author's comments were more like hate campaign against Infosys. Ashish (pluggd.in blogger), your blog is about startups, which in no way means you can criticize big companies like Infosys, Satyam, Wipro employs lakhs of people in India.

Values More Important than Valuations

Ramalinga Raju today resigned as CEO of Satyam and revealed the biggest Indian corporate fraud. 94% of assets shown in Satyam's balance sheet are non existent. All this raises a large number of questions:

• What were independent directors doing all the while?
• What were auditors doing?
• What is SEBI and Government doing?

None of the people above actually gets impacted by this episode, people who actually got affected are:

• 53K employees
• Large number of investors

I always appreciated Satyam not just for what it did for Indian IT industry but also for coming up with state-of-the-art-emergency response system (108) that could help citizens in a timely fashion and save millions of lives. But that can be no excuse for this fraud. Companies should know that valuations are not important but its values and ethics.
All the people involved in this scam should be booked immediately and all their assets ceased. Government should also bailout Satyam and also take all necessary steps to prevent these kind of things happening in future.

Vdopia strikes deal with Network 18

Vdopia, a video ad company has struck deal with Web 18. This is one of biggest deals in India in video ads segment. As part of deal vdopia will display the ads on various Web18 destination sites like ibnlive.com, josh18.com, cricketnext.com, buzz18.com, tech2.com etc.,. Some of the sites like ibnlive.com has large amount of video content.

Malliks: 2009 Predictions

2009 is year of HOPE. 2008 started on crest and ended in trough. In 2009, we are already are at low we can just hope for things to improve by end of 2009. Malliks is very optimistic about 2009 and here are Malliks 2009 predictions.

• Indian Cricket team to be N0.1 Test cricketing nation by end of 2009.
• Indian IT industry will see layoffs and cost cutting till mid of year, reversal may just start after mid 2009 but till year end situation will be more or less same as 2008.
• I would not like to say this but there will be no reduction in terror attacks in 2009 compared to 2008.
• There will be border-tension between India and Pakistan, but there will be no war. There will be increased international pressure on Pakistan to tackle terror in 2009.
• BSE Sensex will be at 13-14K by end of 2009.
• Election year, who will be forming next government is in mind of everyone. BJP led NDA may form government in 2009 with L.K Advani becoming the prime minister.

These are just predictions after analyzing few things. Only time will tell, how correct these predictions are? Lets revisit these on 31 Dec 2009.

Malliks: 2008 Recap [Business & Startups]

In continuation to earlier post, now we will give 2008 recap for Business & Technology sectors.
2008 has been worst year in financial terms with fall of big US investment firms like Bear Sterns, Lehman brothers and other. Later part of 2008 has seen large number of layoffs in US and hiring freeze in India. The worst business decisions for 2008 as per malliks are:

Worst Business Decisions for 2008:

• Satyam's proposal to buy Maytas
• Yahoo's decision not to get acquired by Microsoft

This has been relatively good year for startups. While slowdown helped startups to hire and retain talent, getting funding has been a problematic. Below are Malliks comments on performance of prominent Indian startups during 2008.

Startups in 2008:

• In.com : Best of 2008, This is Network 18 Venture, has grown a lot in terms of traffic in very short time. All the Network 18 web ventures are being consolidated under this domain name.
• Lifemojo: LifeMojo is a startup for nutritionists. Lifemojo found place here because of its innovative B2B business model which solves real problem of nutitionist and which also get Lifemojo a revenue oppurtunity. 2009 will be very important year for Lifemojo.
• Zoho : Zoho has added many products this year. CloudSQL is an innovative product from Zoho in 2008.
• DimDim : DimDim has been around for few years. DimDim got $6 million funding in 2008. DimDim has added many new features in 2008 and competing directly with webex. Recession may be good for dimdim as companies would be looking for cost cutting and dimdim is way to reduce communication costs.
• MobMe : 2008 has been good year for MobMe, MobMe has been in news for its partnership with Malayalam Daily, MobMe’s mobile crime and accident reporting platform
• Cashurdrive : This is an innovative startup for 2008. Cashurdrive is India's first On Wheel advertizing company. 2009 will be interesting year for this company, We would like to see how much will the advertizers be interested in this kind of marketing.
• Ibibo : Ibibo's marketing in 2008 impressed malliks. There is change in their marketing strategy from 2007 wherin they have launched interesting contests this year. But this is one space where competition is intense with entry of in.com. 2009 will see who will emerge as winner in this space.
• Asklaila : Asklaila is winner in local search space for 2008. Asklaila made a strategic local search partnership with MSN cities.
• Guruji : Guruji wants to be google of India. In 2008 guruji has launched music search and finance portal.
• Smsgupshup: This has grown as prominent player in SMS space. This is Webaroo's venture. Smsgupshup is often referred as India's twitter. Smsgupshup got $11million funding in 2008
• Chakpak : This is winner in movies space in 2008. Chakpak's orkut app is one of the popular orkut apps. Orkut app did help chakpak to become a popular player in this space. Chakpak recently got funding from Cannan Investors.

Most of these startup are still looking out for innovative ways for continous revenue stream apart from ad revenues. We hope to see some innovation in revenue models of some of these startups.

Malliks prediction for 2009 coming soon!!

Malliks: 2008 Recap [Blasts, Sports & Bollywood]

2008 has been an eventful year. While we have seen unfortunate events like terror attacks, global economic turmoil at same time we also had good things like individual Olympic gold for India, Chandrayaan projects happening. This posting compiles all the major events that happened in 2008 and also Malliks best and worst.
Bomb Blasts in 2008: [Malliks Worst: Mumbai Blasts]

• November 26: Terror strikes Mumbai. Firing at CST, Taj, Nariman House killing over 200 people.
• October 30: Terror strikes Assam killing 84 people
• September 27: Blast in Delhi's Mehrauli flower market killed 1 and injured 23.
• September 13: Serial blasts in Delhi killed at least 24 people and injured more than 100.
• July 26: Serial blasts in Ahmedabad killing at least 30 people and injuring more than 100.
• July 25: Nine explosions in Bangalore create terror killing two people and injuring twelve.
• May : Eight serial blasts rock Jaipur in a span of 12 minutes leaving 65 dead and over 150 injured.
• January : Terrorist attack on CRPF camp in Rampur kills 8.

Indian Sporting Action: [Malliks Best: Abhinav Bindra's Gold, Malliks Worst: Failing to qualify for Olympics Hockey]

• Dec 4: Saina breaks into top-10 of world badminton at No.10.
• Nov 29: MC Mary Kom wins her fourth consecutive World Championship women's boxing title in China.
• Nov 10: Former India captain Sourav Ganguly retires from international cricket.
• Nov 10: India defeat Australia by 172 runs in the Nagpur cricket Test to seal a 2-0 series victory and win back the much-coveted Border-Gavaskar Trophy. It was the first time Australia had lost a Test series by more than one match since they were trounced by the West Indies in 1988-89.
• Nov 2: India's Test captain Anil Kumble announces his retirement from cricket.
• Oct 29: India's Viswanathan Anand draws the 11th game of the 12-game World Chess Championship final in Bonn against Vladimir Kramnik to take an unbeatable 6.5-4.5 lead and retain his world title.
• Sep 14: Saina wins Chinese Taipei Grand Prix badminton tournament.
• Aug 20: Boxer Vijender Singh wins the bronze at the Olympics after losing his semi-final bout to Cuban Emilio Correa. Vijender becomes the first Indian boxer to win an Olympic medal.
• Aug 20: Wrestler Sushil Kumar bags a bronze at the Olympics. The medal came 56 years after wrestler Khashaba Dadasaheb Jadhav gave the country its maiden individual Olympic medal.
• Aug 11: Shooter Abhinav Bindra wins gold in the 10-metre air rifle event at the Beijing Olympics. He becomes the first Indian to win an individual gold medal. India bags a gold medal after 28 years.
• June 15: Badminton player Saina Nehwal becomes the first Indian to reach the semi-final of a Super Series event at the Singapore Open Super Series.
• June 1: Shane Warne leads Rajasthan Royal to the inaugural IPL title.
• April 24: India's women hockey team also fails to qualify for the Olympics.
• March 9: Eight time gold medal winner India failed to qualify for men's hockey at the Olympics for the first time in 80 years. They lost 0-2 to Great Britain in the final of a qualifying tournament in Santiago, Chile.
• Jan 19: India beat Australia in the Perth Test by 72 runs to stop the World Champions from bettering their record of 16 consecutive Test wins.

Bollywood Flicks:
Total Movies Released: 75 movies
Malliks Top Ten:

• Ghajini
• Jaane tu ya Jaane na
• Race
• Dostana
• A Wednesday
• Rock on
• Fashion
• Dasvidanya
• Singh is king
• Mithya

Malliks comments on few more categories and predictions for 2009 coming soon!!

QA teams are not meant to delay the product release but its otherway

I am in software testing/QA industry for over 3.5 years and have seen different kind of people in this industry. Many times I have seen that QA feels happy when they delay the product release by finding a high-priority bug just before the release. But is the product release delay not bad? Well it may not be as bad as a low quality product but it is. If QA finds a critical bug (which exists in all prior builds) just before release than its as responsible as the dev team for delay in product release.
Frankly speaking, its more of QA responsibility to release the product on time. QA can ensure the same by getting involved very early in product life cycle. By involving I don't mean creating the testing documents, but about white-box or code-review kind of testing, which helps in finding bugs very early in product life cycle.

Guruji Launches Finance Search

Guruji, launched finance search engine, similar to Google Finance for Indian companies. Using Guruji Finance, you can search for quotes and get the stock trend, related news, competitors trend etc, Guruji earlier launched music and movie timings search. Guruji is a sequoia backed startup, same VC which also backed Google. Moneycontrol currently rules this space in India, Will Guruji be able to compete with Moneycontrol?

Startup Saturday: Honeywell and Logica's Startup Initiatives

Honeywell and Logica have announced their startup initiatives in co-ordination with HeadStart at Startup Saturday Bangalore. Honeywell has announced that it is ready to partner with exciting startups and it has already done that with couple of startups in rural healthare and microfinancing space. While Honeywell is clear that it will not invest in any startup but would be ready to make a strategic partnership which would be a win-win situation for both the startup and honeywell. Logica also has announced a startup contest, they are basically looking for startups which will add value to logica's business. The contest will be run by logica in 8 countries, one startup would be selected in each country and a final winner across 8 countries as well. Country winner can use services of Logica's coutry sales whereas international winner will have access to the global logica sales. For more details on logica's startup intitiatives click here.

Firefox doesn't allow accessing the parent frame url whereas Chrome allows in case of cross domain

As you know that codeinspections is now malliks and also as you can see any user opening codeinspection gets automatically redirected to malliks.mazic.in, I am making this posting to explain the technical details about how we did that.
Basically in malliks we have created an index page which has an header and iframe which has the source as the codeinspections.blogspot.com and this works as expected. But I wanted to go a step ahead and let anyone coming to codeinspections automatically get redirected to malliks. I did that by adding a javascript code to the blog and the code looks like below:
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
var urlname=window.location.href;
var flag=0;
try
{
var parenturl=window.parent.location.href;
}
catch(err)
{
flag=1;
}
if(flag==0)
window.location="http://malliks.mazic.in/?url="+urlname;
</script>
This code works in firefox and IE, because these browsers doesn't all you to access the parent frame url if both the parent and child are in different domain. In the above code if user come to site as codeinspections flag will be zero and hence gets redirected to malliks, and when the user is on malliks, javascript code tries to access parent url and gets an exception, therby flag is set to one and hence user is not redirected. I tested this on IE and firefox and it worked fine.
But one of blog reader reported that blog was not opening in the chrome browser and even I tried in browser and it didn't work, it was infinitely getting redirected to malliks, i,e a frame inside a frame and so on infinite frames gets opened. This is because chrome was not giving any exception and it was allowing to freely access the parent frame url. I then added code below to make it work on chrome.
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
var urlname=window.location.href
var flag=0;
try
{
var parenturl=window.parent.location.href;
var subparent=parenturl.substring(0,22);
if(subparent=="http://codeinspections")
flag=0;
else
flag=1;
}
catch(err)
{
flag=1;
}
//alert(flag+" "+parenturl);

//alert(flag+" "+subparent);

if(flag==0)
window.location="http://malliks.mazic.in/?url="+urlname;
//-->
</script>
With increasing number of browsers(IE6,IE7,firfox 2,firfox 3,chrome IE8), it challenge for developers to write a code which works perfectly on all these browsers. Whats your take on this?

Also Read: Codeinspections Will Now Be Malliks
Google More Confident: Strips off Beta Tag Within 100 Days of Release
Secuirty Issues in Chrome Browser