Edunology - Saumya Aggarwal

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Economic Times released “India’s best companies to work for (2013)” earlier this week and declared following as top 10.

1. Google
2. Intel  Technology
3. American Express
4. NIIT
5. Forbes Marshall
6. NTPC
7. Ujjivan Financial Services
8. MakeMyTrip
9. Marriott Hotels
10. Blue Dart Express

Interesting to note names like NTPC which is public sector organization and not so well known names like Forbes Marshall, Ujjvan Financial Services. Recently I remember lot of friends signing "Bloody Monday tu mera khoon chus le (Bloody Monday, you can sucking my blood)", however in these companies employees love coming to work. Few standout examples from the survey which really make these organizations a great place to work.

Google has amazing 20% time program where employees have flexibility to work for 20% on projects that are completely unrelated to their regular work. Flat organization structure, collaborative decision taking, merit based promotion and genuine employee care are few learnings from this best organization.

In Intel, managers ensure that personal life of subordinates is not affected and there is bond among colleagues beyond typical manager-subordinate relation.

“Chairman’s Quality Club” in NIIT identifies top talent to be further developed under the chairman of the company.

Marriott, right from Junior associates are encouraged to stay for one night with families on occassions such as birthdays. Blue dart prides itself in growing in house talent with whopping 96% of senior management growing with in the company.

Key highlights that can be learned from such examples:
1. Scope of something new in job
2. Humans are treated like humans with love and bonding
3. Recognition by top management
4. Perks/society recognition to motivate employees at root level also
5. Merit based promotion with preference to in house talent

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RailRadar, an application which gives you muscle to track Indian Railways trains in real time. It uses the Google Maps platform to deliver timings, location, station, routes and schedules of more than 6,500 trains on a real time basis.

RailRadar has been developed by Centre for Railway Information System and uses a top level colour coding system to mark trains as blue and red. Blue arrows indicate trains running on time while red arrows are those which have been delayed. Users can use the + and – buttons to zoom in and zoom out of the map.

Clicking on an arrow will reveal train details and its route on the map. The details include the train’s number and name, last stop, station at which it will halt next and the train’s status as on-time or delayed in minutes. The real time status will generally be on a 5 minute delay.

Few observations:

1. Ease of use
2. Google Maps interface which looks familiar
3. Website loads quickly, no comparison with sucking IRCTC site
4. Most importantly, it gives loads of information like estimated arrival, halt duration, last stop, train status, exact location, timetables.

In nutshell, it is welcome step with right use of technology.

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Google has come hard to big blog networks with huge links and term them as "Fake SEO" techniques. Below is screenshot of what big webmasters are receiving:

When did it start?

It seems all the buzz started with de-indexing of large link networks. It means that Google will remove these networks (inter-linked, self sustain planet of sites) from its crawler. Strangely, few of these networks have been running for years and made millions of dollars already.

Why is it happening?
Few of the reasons that I have collated are:
> Involvement in any artificial link networks
> To and fro content from low quality blogs
> Usage of link blasts
> Excessive use of rich anchor text
If you have used one or more of above, then removing it is the only way out.

If you’ve received this message, then remove the links and send reconsideration request to Google. It might not restore your lost rank but still worth trying.

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As I was sitting today after my Product Management role at Makemytrip, I decided to explore Search Engine Optimization. The leader Google was the starting point. Certainly I came to know about Panda update from Google last month. Here is my finding:

What is Google Panda?

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When a tablet version of Chrome OS was teased back in February of last year, we found it a legitimately exciting proposition. Now that we have Android's Honeycomb iteration designed specifically for slates, however, we're having to wonder just why Google's still chasing that keyboard-less dream with its web-centric OS. CNET has been doing some snooping in and around the latest iterations of Chrome OS, where it's discovered numerous pieces of circumstantial evidence, such as a new onscreen keyboard, suggesting tablets are still very much on the menu. Chrome OS kicked off life on the development device known as Cr-48 and will resume availability this summer courtesy of Acer and Samsung, though we'd kind of assumed it would stick to notebooks now that Android's making a sincere effort on devices bigger than an EVO. Mountain View has responded to CNET's queries with a pretty inconclusive statement, saying only that "We are engaging in early open-source work for the tablet form factor, but we have nothing new to announce at this time."

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If you are a regular user of the Firefox browser then you are used to seeing the search box in the top right hand corner of the window. You are also used to the default search engine for that box being Google.

That default option didn’t just happen and Google pay to be the first choice. Google and Mozilla renegotiated to extend the relationship between the browser and the search engine until November 2011.

What this translates to is a lot of money for Mozilla to continue developing their many software projects, while Google retains the important default search option in the browser that is increasingly taking market share from Microsoft.

Even though they offer free software, you can see the potential for revenue through these partnerships. That revenue is also extremely important in allowing projects like Firefox and Thunderbird to get the support they need. I’m sure whatever the final direction the Thunderbird e-mail client takes there is going to be opportunities to generate new revenue as well; and Mozilla will certainly take them.

Mozilla, the organization behind the popular Firefox web browser, has extended its search deal with Google for another three years. In return for setting Google as the default search engine on Firefox, Google pays Mozilla a substantial sum – in 2006 the total amounted to around $57 million, or 85% of the company’s total revenue.

Mozilla uses the funds to pay staff, support its bandwidth and hardware infrastructure, and to distribute a number of grants. Because the search giant accounts for 85% of its revenues, Mozilla has become almost totally reliant on Google, something that has apparently concerned a number of members in the open source community. But Mozilla maintains that the two organizations operate independently.

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that owns two taxable companies that earmark all profits for the Foundation’s open source projects. You can see the original announcement at Mozilla Chairperson Mitchell Baker’s blog.

It would be interestingly to see if Bing makes a dent into partnership and gain some market share.

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EVO 3D for the first time, and what struck immediately is that it's not as beefy, bulky, or overwhelming as the 4.3-inch display or specs might have you believe -- if you're familiar with the EVO 4G, you'll feel right at home here (and you might even be pleasantly surprised). The screen's stereoscopic 3D effect is about as good as what we've seen on the Optimus 3D in the past -- very good head-on with decreasing effectiveness as you move your head to the side. The 2D / 3D switch along the side is for the camera, not the display; it seems that all management of the screen's capabilities is managed in software alone. Check out the shots in the gallery below; now if you'll excuse us, we're going to go play with this monster some more!

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A researcher at North Carolina State University is warning of an Android 2.3 security vulnerability that gives attackers access to your personal information, further proof that Gingerbread isn't all sugar and spice (to be fair, that SMS issue has since been remedied). According to Xuxian Jiang, the bug allows malicious websites to access and upload the contents of a user's microSD card, including voicemails, photos, and online banking information to a remote server. The flaw apparently resembles a similar bug in previous version of Android, thought to have been addressed with Gingerbread. However, as Jiang points out, that fix is easily bypassed. Apart from removing the microSD card, disabling JavaScript, or switching to a third-party browser, Android 2.3 users have little recourse in squashing the bug. The folks at eWeek reported that Google is working on a solution to the problem, but there's no word on when we can expect to see an update.

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Mountain View has selected Wednesday, February 2nd for an event that'll include "an in-depth look at Honeycomb, Android ecosystem news and hands-on demos," so by all accounts this seems to be more than a mere wrap-up of everything they've announced in the past few weeks. We need to check out the event for some latest news, may be Google is up for something big this time.

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Google Inc will begin blocking Facebook and other Web services from accessing its users' information , highlighting an intensifying rivalry between the two Internet giants.

Google will no longer let other services automatically import its users' email contact data for their own purposes, unless the information flows both ways. It accused Facebook in particular of siphoning up Google contact data, without allowing for the automatic import and export of Facebook users' information.

Facebook, with more than 500 million users, relies on email services such as Google's Gmail to help new users find friends already on the network. When a person joins, they are asked to import their Gmail contact list into the social network service. Facebook then tells the user which email contacts are also on the social network.

In a statement, Google said websites such as Facebook "leave users in a data dead end." Facebook did not immediately provide a comment on Friday.

While Google framed the move as an attempt to protect its users' ability to retain control of their personal data on the Internet, analysts said the move underscored the battle between Google, the world's largest search engine, and Facebook, the dominant Internet social network.

"The fundamental power dynamic on the Web today is this emerging conflict between Facebook and Google," said Gartner analyst Ray Valdes. "Google needs to evolve to become a big player in the social Web and it hasn't been able to do that."

"If people do search within Facebook, if they do email within Facebook, if they do instant messaging within Facebook, all of these will chip away at Google's properties."

RECIPROCITY

Google said that while it makes it easy for other Web services to automatically import a user's contact data, Facebook was not reciprocating.

"We have decided to change our approach slightly to reflect the fact that users often aren't aware that once they have imported their contacts into sites like Facebook, they are effectively trapped," Google said in an emailed statement.

"We will no longer allow websites to automate the import of users' Google Contacts (via our API) unless they allow similar export to other sites," Google said. 


via ET

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A lot of Gmail users are noticing a major drop in the performance of the user interface in the recent times. A small trick which can really help in slow connections:

1. Turn on Offline Gmail.
2. Turn on Flaky connection mode.
3. That’s it.

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The biggest search engine in the world has decided to take on the US government, suing it for anticompetitive practices. Certainly big news, it still isn’t much of a shocker, as Google seems to be rather justified in its stance.


Google is suing the Department of Interior (DOI) for not considering Google Apps for its web-based document and messaging needs in its Request for Quotation, which stated that the solution had to be a part of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite. This according to Google is “unduly restrictive of competition”, and an "arbitrary and capricious, and abuse of discretion, and otherwise contrary to law" requirement.

DOI so far maintains that Microsoft’s solutions offered something the competition didn’t, specifically “unified/consolidated email” and “enhanced security”. Google of course disputes this claim, and pointed out several flaws and problems with Microsoft’s solutions, including recent vulnerabilities and downtime issues. In other words, Google is accusing the DOI of Microsoft favouritism.

Google has been competing against Microsoft for various government contracts so far, and both have had their victories at the state and city level. According to Google though, it has been attempting to demonstrate the many benefits of Google Apps to the DOI since June last year, but it had been reputedly refused since. Google now says that though DOI kept insisting that the contract was wide open in this period, work had already started with Microsoft's solution. Now, Google wants a fair chance to make a bid for the job, 'in accordance with applicable law and regulations'.

Microsoft has not commented on the lawsuit so far.

via Thinkdigit

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Opera has announced  a full-fledged Opera Mobile browser for smartphones running the Google Android OS. Opera Mobile for Android, which is slated to arrived within a month, will feature hardware acceleration and pinch-to-zoom functionality.

So far the company offered only Opera Mini for Android, a scaled-down version of its browser, designed for less capable phones. Instead of translating and compressing pages through a server before reaching the user, Opera says Opera Mobile for Android will be a full-fledged browser, on the par with Android's built-in browser or Safari on iOS.

Opera claims hardware acceleration will give a major speed boost to Opera Mobile for Android, alongside some user interface improvements. One feature leveraged by hardware acceleration will be pinch-to-zoom, so that you can adjust the zoom level to your liking, instead of relying on the two preset levels of zoom on Opera Mini.

Some website layouts do not display correctly with Opera Mini.

It's unknown how fast Opera Mobile for Android will be in comparison to Opera Mini. The latter compresses website data by up to 90 percent before pushing content to your smartphone, so you get fast loading times even on slow network connections. This has a disadvantage, as fonts and some website layouts do not display correctly on your phone - which is what Opera Mobile plans to address.

Opera Mobile for Android won't be the only third-party browser on the platform. Mozilla previewed earlier this year the Android version of Firefox called Fennec, which is still in its early stages. If you're not happy with the built-in browser on your Android phone, you can wait for Opera Mobile or Fennec, or you can take the Dolphin Browser, a cool browser with pinch-to-zoom and gesture commands, for a spin.

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While Google launched its own URL shortening service quite a while back, it has finally given it its own website, namely, http://goo.gl. So while you can now access the Google URL shortener much more easily, without resorting to the Google Toolbar or Feedburner, Google also says they have improved the service in many ways. Here’s how, in Google’s words:

There are many shorteners out there with great features, so some people may wonder whether the world really needs yet another. As we said late last year, we built goo.gl with a focus on quality. With goo.gl, every time you shorten a URL, you know it will work, it will work fast, and it will keep working. You also know that when you click a goo.gl shortened URL, you’re protected against malware, phishing and spam using the same industry-leading technology we use in search and other products. Since our initial release, we’ve continued to invest in the core quality of the service:

Stability: We've had near 100% uptime since our initial launch, and we've worked behind the scenes to make goo.gl even stabler and more robust

Security: We've added automatic spam detection based on the same type of filtering technology we use in Gmail

Speed: We've more than doubled our speed in just over nine months

Also, you will be able to create QR (quick response) codes very, very easily, by simply adding “.qr” to the end of the shortened URL that's generated by Goo.gl. This is obviously a nod in the direction of mobile apps that can scan QR codes, and Google has used them in the past for the installation of Android apps.

Other features of the URL shortener include the ability to view a list of your shortened URLs when you log in via your Google account, and, various analytics about those links.

Google says it will release the API to the service soon to allow developers to give users of their applications the ability to shorten/expand URLs, as well as view analytics, directly. It is already available as an extension for Chrome and Firefox. The move comes soon after Twitter launched its own URL shortening service.

via Thinkdigit

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Google has probably made one of the toughest decision regarding Gmail by offering an option to disable conversations view.

Conversations was one of the innovations of Gmail and it changed the way a lot of us deal with emails on a daily basis.

However, there are still users out there who prefer it the old way. Just like we have it on Yahoo and Hotmail and in most desktop clients.

They took a long time to accept the demands and they have finally given in.

Gmail now allows you to disable the conversations mode. You can have emails in your Gmail Inbox in the old style.

The company stated in a blog posting:

Conversation view is perhaps Gmail’s most hotly debated feature. Threading enthusiasts say they spend less mental energy drawing connections between related messages and that their inboxes are much less cluttered. On the other hand, email traditionalists like many former Outlook users think conversation view just complicates something that has worked for years.

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US web surfers, the best of all as many say are spending more time on Facebook than Google according to research conducted at comScore Inc.

In August, people spent a total of 41.1 million minutes on Facebook, comScore said, about 9.9 per cent of their Web-surfing minutes for the month. That just barely surpassed the 39.8 million minutes, or 9.6 per cent, people spent on all of Google Inc's sites combined, including YouTube, the free Gmail email program, Google news and other content sites.
In August of last year, Web surfers spent less than 5 per cent of their online time on Facebook, about the same percentage of their time on Google and almost 12 per cent on Yahoo. In August 2007, Facebook captured less than 2 per cent of US surfers' total minutes. Google accounted for less than 4 per cent, and Yahoo for just over 12 per cent.

Is searching loosing its mark with more people remain connected online?
Well the answer will soon be clear. I myself finds most authentic information on twitter rather than on news sites.