#tech – Page 4 – nitin badjatia

Apple’s garden walls grow taller

Finally, after the over hyped launch of the iPhone 3G, someone has come out and questioned Apple‘s walled garden approach to application development for their phone. Don’t get me wrong, I’m probably going to buy one in a few weeks, but I’ve been wondering why Apple was getting a pass on it’s closed system, and mainly by the same folks that challenge any regime that Microsoft puts in place. From TechCrunchIT

Apple has wrapped the iPhone SDK in enough licensing, security controls and right management that it would make the Microsoft Active Desktop team blush. The phone and platform that is certain to soon take second spot behind Symbian in the smart phone market is also the most restricted and closed. Applications can only be installed from a single source, iTunes, and open source applications and distribution is near impossible. How do you install an iPhone application without iTunes? Where are the community advocates arguing for a standard interface, openess and free code?

UPDATE: Gina Tripani piles on.

Quick update on SMSGupShup

Just a couple of days ago I wrote about SMSGupShup, a micro-blogging application that was developed for the Indian market. Techcrunch is reporting that the company has secured additional funding:

Webaroo Raises A $10 Million Round For SMSGupShup

webarooWebaroo Technology has raised a $10 million round of funding for their product SMSGupShup, an SMS-based community site in India, according to Plugged.in. The round, the third for the company, was co-led by Helion Venture Partners and Charles River Ventures.

The real potential of micro-blogging is in developing countries

Given a slow morning, I was just reading through some older Google Reader feeds, and came upon this excellent post over at VentureBeat. Anand Rajaraman is an investor in an Indian service called SMS GupShup, which serves as a Twitter-like micro-blogging service for the Indian mobile market. Why would micro-blogging matter in places like India? Here’s a short example that Rajaraman mentions:

One day the GupShup spam control team noticed several messages that looked like gobbledygook to them. So they sent these suspected spammers account termination notices. They didn’t expect the response: messages not just from those senders but from many others, pleading with them not to terminate the accounts. It turns out the messages were in a language called Hmar, only spoken by some 65,000 tribal people living in the hilly regions of India’s northeast. There are now several Hmar groups on SMS GupShup; the tribal group sees this as a major communication channel. Being too small to attract mainstream media, the group also sees SMS GupShup as their main form of media and a way to save their language and culture from extinction as they assimilate into the Indian mainstream.

Amazing.

Amazon.com went down today, but cloud services not affected

As I’m writing this, amazon.com is down. It’s not just me, others are twittering about it. I can’t remember the last time a major site like Amazon going down. It’s been down for a while. Amazon’s cloud services seem to be working just fine, however, as my Amazon S3 account is still accessible. It can’t be good for Bezos’ push into cloud computing if his anchor site is down.

Update: @ 3.35pm EDT it looks like amazon.com is back up. I wonder if we’ll get an explanation on the downtime.

Amazon’s push onto the cloud explained by Bezos

Image via Wikipedia

Om Malik managed to catch Jeff Bezos offstage at Walt Mossberg’s D6 conference last week, and the resulting video provides great insight into Amazon’s cloud computing efforts. If you haven’t been following the build out of cloud computing as closely as I have, let me provide some context. Amazon introduced several computing solutions that act like infrastructure utilities. They are priced by a usage model and are highly scalable. The resulting effect has been to provide a very powerful infrastructure to both individuals and startups to build robust computing solutions on. These solutions range from simple file storage, at a very affordable 15 cents per gigabyte per month, to complex computing and database applications. What makes Amazon’s efforts so significant is that the services allow everyone to harness storage and scalability in a leasing model whereby you only pay for the ‘amount’ – of storage, database and computing power – that you use, nothing more and nothing less.

Aligning to the right market

Om Malik just linked to an excellent post by Dare Obasanjo in which Dare takes a second look at the market for web 2.0 companies and reminds them that there are substantial differences between the early adopters and the real market that those companies are aiming for. As I’ve said in the past, I think Twitter is a classic example of a technology that may not make the leap across the chasm.