Sudesh Mesta

Meet ctrlQ.org – a search tool to help you discover RSS feeds around your topics of interest. You may use ctrlQ to find feeds for blogs, news websites, podcasts, and more.

A unique feature (see video demo) of this tool is that it you can preview feed content inline, from the the search results page itself, thus making it easier for you to decide whether a site / feed matches your interest or not.

You may use any of the Google advanced search operators - like site, allintitle or inurl – in your queries to further refine your search results. If you find an interesting feed, hit the corresponding Subscribe link to subscribe to that feed in your preferred news reader.

The site internally uses Google Feeds API while the presentation is made possible with YUI Library and the awesome jQuery. The feed button is powered by AddToAny.

Until a couple of days ago, we knew that Android was on it’s way to become the most dominant OS in the smartphone market. Who knew the day would come this soon. Yes, you heard me right.

According to Canalys, Android has now surpassed Nokia on becoming the world’s best selling smartphone platform in Q4 2010.

It was not long ago that Google crossed Apple, and passing Nokia was anticipated to take place sooner than later. Nokia dropped its ball in the smartphone game when Symbian and Maemo took a halt, and MeeGo failed to enter the market anytime soon.

The statistics point out to Google’s growth as whooping 615% from Q4 2009 to Q4 2010.

The percentage share grew from 8.7 in 2009 to 33.3 in Q4 2010. However, market share of Nokia declined from 44.4% in 2009 to 31% in Q4 2010. With the current pace and change in the management of Nokia, there is still a chance for them to bounce back.

Apple, even though, saw an increase in the number of shipments, holds almost the same market share as it held in Q4 last year.

Android’s pace of expansion has been rapid and there are no second thoughts about it.

With Google leaving no stone unturned in the development of Android operating system, the market share is only expected to go steeper.

Have you switched to Android yet?

When Apple announces a new product, it is not uncommon to find scores of people queuing outside their retail stores on the launch day hoping to grab a unit before the store runs out of stock.

The queues are often longer for products like the iPad, where Apple has managed to create a new category of computing devices that fit perfectly between a smartphone and your computer.

On Friday Apple launched the iPad in Indiabut if you were expecting a similar reception for this “magical” device here, you’ll be mostly disappointed. That’s because the India launch is happening some nine months after it became available in the U.S. and therefore a lot of people, who would have bought that device on day one of its launch, may have already got it with the help of their friends in U.S. or even from the gray market.

There’s another reason why most people here aren’t very excited about the first-generation iPad. There are rumors that the next version of the iPad, which is expected to be thinner and lighter, may be announced in the next few months.

The feeling is that Apple is using India as a dumping ground to get rid of all the old inventory as they prepare to launch the second-generation iPad.

That said, now that iPad is available through official channels in India, does it make sense to get an iPad now or should you wait for iPad 2 or go with an alternative?

While it is obvious that Apple doesn’t give much weight to the Indian market, there are lot of things that go in favor of the iPad.

It’s a brilliant device for web surfing and entertainment, you get access to thousands of apps around everything, the battery life is good and the touch experience is extremely impressive.

Critics may point out that it doesn’t support Flash but after using the iPad for such a long time, I don’t really see that as a limitation. There’s no camera and you can’t make phone calls but would you really want to do this on a tablet?

The iPad is available as Wi-Fi and Wifi+3G and you should choose one based on your requirement. If you plan to use the device in your home or office, the Wi-Fi version should be just fine but if you are planning to carry it on road-trips, you should go with a 3G model.

The premium is also not very high. The base model, the 16 GB Wi-Fi-only iPad, costs around 20% more than the US and probably that’s what prompted Samsung to drop the price of Galaxy Tab to match it with the iPad. The Tab is smaller, hence more portable, and has two cameras for video calling but reviewers I have spoken to say it’s not as polished as the iPad.

The big question – should you buy now or wait? Well in the world of gadgets, if you always wait for a future version, you can never buy anything because there’s always something bettercoming your way in the next few months.

There are quite a few tablets coming this year but we don’t really know how they’ll compare to the iPad and when will they become available in India through official channels.

Courtesy: Amit Agarwal and WSJ Blog

Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) is a new version of the Android platform that is designed from the ground up for devices with larger screen sizes, particularly tablets. It introduces a new “holographic” UI theme and an interaction model that builds on the things people love about Android — multitasking, notifications, widgets, and others — and adds many new features as well.

Besides the user-facing features it offers, Android 3.0 is also specifically designed to give developers the tools and capabilities they need to create great applications for tablets and similar devices, together with the flexibility to adapt existing apps to the new UI while maintaining compatibility with earlier platform versions and other form-factors.

Today, they are releasing a preview of the Android 3.0 SDK, with non-final APIs and system image, to allow developers to start testing their existing applications on the tablet form-factor and begin getting familiar with the new UI patterns, APIs, and capabilties that will be available in Android 3.0.

Here are some of the highlights:

UI framework for creating great apps for larger screen devices: Developers can use a new UI components, new themes, richer widgets and notifications, drag and drop, and other new features to create rich and engaging apps for users on larger screen devices.

High-performance 2D and 3D graphics: A new property-based animation framework lets developers add great visual effects to their apps. A built-in GL renderer lets developers request hardware-acceleration of common 2D rendering operations in their apps, across the entire app or only in specific activities or views. For adding rich 3D scenes, developers take advantage of a new 3D graphics engine called Renderscript.

Support for multicore processor architectures: Android 3.0 is optimized to run on either single- or dual-core processors, so that applications run with the best possible performance.

Rich multimedia: New multimedia features such as HTTP Live streaming support, a pluggable DRM framework, and easy media file transfer through MTP/PTP, give developers new ways to bring rich content to users.

New types of connectivity: New APIs for Bluetooth A2DP and HSP let applications offer audio streaming and headset control. Support for Bluetooth insecure socket connection lets applications connect to simple devices that may not have a user interface.

Enhancements for enterprise: New administrative policies, such as for encrypted storage and password expiration, help enterprise administrators manage devices more effectively.

For an complete overview of the new user and developer features, see the Android 3.0 Platform Highlights.

Additionally, they are releasing updates to our SDK Tools (r9), NDK (r5b), and ADT Plugin for Eclipse (9.0.0). Key features include:

• UI Builder improvements in the ADT Plugin:
  • Improved drag-and-drop in the editor, with better support for included layouts.
  • In-editor preview of objects animated with the new animation framework.
  • Visualization of UI based on any version of the platform. independent of project target. Improved rendering, with better support for custom views.

To find out how to get started developing or testing applications using the Android 3.0 Preview SDK, see the Preview SDK Introduction. Details about the changes in the latest versions of the tools are available on the SDK Tools, the ADT Plugin, andNDK pages on the site.

Note that applications developed with the Android 3.0 Platform Preview cannot be published on Android Market. We’ll be releasing a final SDK in the weeks ahead that you can use to build and publish applications for Android 3.0.

Many of us are guilty of constantly switching back to Gmail to check for new messages. And if you’re like me, you’ve probably missed an important chat message because you weren’t looking at your Gmail window when it came in. If you use Google Chrome, these days can be over since we just launched HTML5 desktop notifications which display pop-ups whenever a chat message or new email arrives.

To turn them on, click on the Settings link in the top right corner of Gmail and scroll down to the “Desktop Notifications” section. If you just want to get notified about chat messages, or if you use Priority Inbox and only want to get notifications for important messages, you can customize your settings from there too.

This functionality is currently only available for people using Google Chrome, but they’re working to make notifications part of the standard Web platform.

The WikiGoans, a team of Wikimedia enthusiasts comprising of Sudesh Mesta, Shradha Shahapurkar and Prajyot Mainkar hosted the very first Wikimedia meet in the state of Goa, the purpose being the 10th anniversary celebration of The Wikimedia Foundation on the 15th of January 2011 at Miramar Beach, Panjim, Goa.

The WikiMeet was attended by 23 Wikimedia enthusiasts, their backgrounds ranging from students to the working class.

The agenda included a brief discussion of The Wikimedia Foundation, followed by an introduction to all the fellow WikiGoans.

Later on, the group went on to discuss the activities that need be carried out in the subsequent meets, with a promise to create awareness about Open Source and Wikipedia in the state of Goa.

(download)

Click here to download:

wikigoans-present-wikimeet-1-0-qwqzuviAwoxspaFBFyFo.zip (602 KB)

The optimization tool is the latest result of Google's speed obsession and could add to the company's bottom line.

Google wants to make the Web faster. As well as optimizing its own sites and services to run at blazing speed, the company has been helping to streamline the rest of the Web, too. Now Google has released free software that could make many sites load twice as fast.

The software, called mod_pagespeed, can be installed and configured on Apache Web servers, the most commonly used software for running websites. Once installed, mod_pagespeed determines ways to optimize a site's performance on the fly. For example, it will compress images more efficiently and change settings so that more of the pages are stored in a user's browser cache, so that the same data doesn't have to be loaded repeatedly. The software will be automatically updated, notes Richard Rabbat, product manager for the new project. He says that this means that as Google and others make improvements, people who install it will benefit without having to make any changes.

"We think making the whole Web faster is critical to Google's success," says Rabbat. Making the Web faster should encourage people to use it more and increase the likelihood that they will use Google's services and software. Rabbat points to the frustration that people feel when they click a link or type a URL and see a blank page for several seconds. "In many cases," he says, "I'll navigate away when that happens."

Google already offers a tool called Page Speed that measures the speed at which a website loads and suggests ways to make improvements. "We asked ourselves, instead of just telling people what the problems are, can we just fix it for them automatically?" Rabbat says.

The software could be particularly useful to operators of small websites. Such people may not have the skill or time to optimize their site's performance themselves. It should also be useful for companies that use content management systems to operate their websites and lack the technical capabilities needed to make speed improvements to Web server software themselves.

Google tested mod_pagespeed on a representative sample of websites and found that it made some sites load three times faster, depending on how much optimization had already been done.

Google is also making deals with other companies to ensure that mod_pagespeed is widely distributed. Hosting company GoDaddy, for example, plans to add the software to its Web hosting products. According to GoDaddy's president and chief operating officer, Warren Adelman, the software will offer a way to "make it easier for our Web hosting customers to build the best website possible with the least amount of effort." Google's Page Speed tool, he notes, "required a certain degree of technical savvy for website operators to implement," and he expects the new tool to have a broader impact. 

By [Sudesh Mesta]

The Indian Government and the Unicode Consortium deserves to be praised for getting this through so quickly.

The new design for the Rupee currency symbol was approved in July this year and within a span of less than three months, the symbol has been made part of the official Unicode Standard.

The Unicode Consortium, the organization that is responsible for maintaining the Unicode Standard, today formally announced Unicode Version 6.0 which includes some 2000+ new characters and one among them is the official Rupee currency sign for India.

It may however take some time before you can type the Rupee sign in your documents just like the $ or € symbols as none of the major font families, except for DejaVu fonts, have been upgraded to support Unicode Standard version 6.0.0 yet. You can use this page to determine if any of the fonts installed on your machine are capable of rendering the new Rupee character.

Once the families are upgraded, you’ll be able to use the HTML code ₹ in your web pages to display the new Rupee symbol or by pressing the Alt key followed by 20B9 in word processors.

The Indian IT department had initially proposed that the character code U+0971 be assigned to the Indian Rupee sign, as the code was within the range of Devnagri characters, but the Unicode Consortium approved the code U+20B9 which is the same range that is used for other currency symbols like Euro, Franc and Peso.

Via [labnol]

Updated: Twitter founder Evan Williams announced today in a post on the company’s blog that he is stepping down from the CEO position at the rapidly growing social-networking startup, and that former chief operating officer Dick Costolo will take the CEO position, effective immediately. Williams said he will focus on product strategy rather than overall corporate direction, and that Costolo — the former co-founder of Feedburner, which was acquired by Google in 2007 — has been “a critical leader in devising and executing our revenue efforts,” including the advertising feature the company launched today, known as Promoted Accounts.

Update: Earlier this year, there were rumors of a power struggle within the company between Williams and Costolo, but in his blog post the former CEO — who took the top job in 2008, after it was spun off from his earlier company, a podcasting service called Odeo — gave the impression that he is confident handing the direction of the company over to his former COO. “Twitter is on a roll,” Williams said. The recent redesign of the website has been popular with users, he added, and “user and usage numbers are growing at a rapid clip all around the world,” while the company has added “many top engineers, product designers, sales people and other key folks” to its staff, which Williams said now numbers 300 (compared with just 20 two years ago).

Meanwhile, in an emailed statement about the transition, Dick Costolo — who joked after joining the company last year that his first task would be to “undermine the CEO and consolidate power” — said:

I love working with Evan Williams… I completely respect his decision to focus on product strategy and vision. As we’ve all seen with the new Twitter, when Ev focuses on product, something amazing can happen. I’m certainly excited to be taking on this role. You couldn’t ask to take a job like this at a better time – the team is incredible, we have awesome stuff in the pipeline, and we’re ready to accomplish more in the next two years than we’ve accomplished in the last four.

In his blog post, Williams added that “the challenges of growing an organization so quickly are numerous,” and that “success to us means meeting our potential as a profitable company that can retain its culture and user focus while having a positive impact on the world.” On thinking about these challenges, the former CEO said he came to a realization that “I am most satisfied while pushing product direction. Building things is my passion, and I’ve never been more excited or optimistic about what we have to build.” Williams and Costolo told TechCrunch that the executive change was triggered by the design and rolloutof the new Twitter, while Union Square partner and Twitter board member Fred Wilsoncalled the decision “a very smart and gutsy move by Ev.”

Twitter may also have to move its headquarters again soon, judging by a recent trip to its offices in SoMa. Despite having taken over a second floor in May and having several dozen empty desks, communications staffer Carolyn Penner said that at the rate the company is growing “we will probably be full again soon,” and that the startup would likely have to move in the spring. Twitter moved into the new building less than a year ago. The move to install a seasoned CEO like Costolo in the executive suite is bound to increase speculation about a possible public offering by the company, which raised almost $100 million last year, giving the startup a $1-billion plus valuation.

Via [GigaOm]