A few months ago, I blogged about Yahoo! shutting down its Kisckstart service.
Well, off lately Yahoo! has been shutting down a whole lot of its services most notably Yahoo! 360 - soon in July 2009.

The other common services of Yahoo! that shutdown were :

1. Yahoo! Mash, a social networking service lasted for a year ended in September 2008.
2. Yahoo! Live, a real-time video broadcasting experiment ended after a 6 months stint in December 2008.
3. Yahoo! Content Match, a Google Adsense clone shuts down in Europe.
4. Jumpcut, an online video editing tool closed down just a couple of days back (15th June 2009).
5. Yahoo! Podcasts, a podcasting directory end after 2 years in October 2007.
6. Yahoo! Auctions, an eBay competitor ended in September 2008.
7. Yahoo! Photos shut down in September 2007 but got replaced with their better acquired service, Flickr.
8. Yahoo Briefcase, a free storage service ended after a decade in March 2009.
9. Geocities, the 90's most famous free static website hosting service is closing this year - but this one is not as a result of failure - after all it was one of the biggest success stories in the 90s - it just got worn off - retired - antique - much better ones available/evolved over the last 15 years.

Yahoo! may not be dying, but its definitely try to recover its No.1 position it had a decade-and-a-half ago.

With jobs cut stories being published everyday, more and more smaller companies are sprouting up daily. While on the quest for a job myself, most of the recent postings at various job portals like Naukri and Monster are from startups companies with 5 to 25 employees. I was going through various companies' websites and came across many more startup companies and related websites that seems very fascinating. I don't remember all the websites I've been through except for one which was uniquely enough to be rememberable - IonLab.

Big companies are now looking to aquire rather than hire. Google and Microsoft have been acquiring constantly in the recent years. But Google has pushed this even further with Google Ventures - a $100 million annual funding for startups and Google App Engine - web hosting on Google's high-end scalable servers. Commenting on Microsoft's Bing, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that :

"We have been wandering around looking at all of the different companies. With the big ones, we haven't come across anything we've particularly liked. We are definitely talking to a number of smaller companies but we've done that routinely. We primarily look for technology. It's a typical build versus buy"

But this isn't limited to big giants alone - even Twitter, (small company now with big money), bought Summize for their search part.

And start-up guru, Paul Graham who apparently hates running a startup has funded about 150 startups !

Startups in India are creating a buzz (read: Related Links) : StartupBuzz, StartupDunia, Pluggd In

There is a lot of hype on Wolfram Alpha that launched on 15th - a brand new search engine, from the company famous for its Mathematica software.
But this search engine is math based (no surprise) - which calculate 'answers' to your questions - or rather tries to figure out answers to the questions you are querying.

They even posted their infrastructure details - having the 44th largest supercomputer, mirrored at 5 different locations and can handle 175+ million queries a day.

I tried a little more than a couple of queries, most of which returned Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.
I tried queries based on my hometown, Trivandrum, Kerala which I keep track of on the net from time to time. Given "Where is Trivandrum", it showed the map of India with Trivandrum marked. But it doesn't seem to know anything about kerala - one of the top 50 tourist locations in the world (National Geographic). If this isn't in their current database of 10+ trillion of pieces of data, its going to be hard for me to find information using it.

Then I tried input queries on stuff it could 'definitely' search on - maths. 10000! gave the first bunch of 35660 digits but you can easily extend the number of digits. But even expressions like "5+132!-59^5*sin(32)/5log(12)15" showed results with neat details. Over 20 years in the making of Mathematica, Wolfram would probably have the best number search engine. But "Knowledge" based ? It doesn't seem to have a lot of knowledge as of now.

After a while it just got tired of searching.

Everyone is curious about who or what will be the next Google. There is a big surety among many, even by Tim Berners Lee, that semantic web search will overtake statistical based web search (GYM). Wolfram Alpha is going to take a while to catch up, but results from statistical data is still more important to users with the current available data on the net. Right now, Wolfram Alpha is a really cool Internet Calculator.

Last year I worked with a client here in Mumbai for their online store, BombayElectric.in which is based on Magento, an open-source platform. My client was the national winner of British Council's Young Fashion Entrepreneur (YFE) Award 2009.

For the last 4 and so years I've always shyed away from a full-time job since I managed to get freelance work right after college. After a ring of uneventful events last year, I decided to shift base and take up the stature of an employee. Earlier last month, I finally took up a full-time job in an internet ad/marketing agency here in Mumbai. To my surprise, I discovered that the guy who runs this small unique company happens to be the national winner of British Council's Young Communications Entrepreneur (YXE) award 2009 !

Quite a Coincidence !

Update : I ended up quitting from this awesome advertising firm. This is the longest (just 3 months) I've lasted so far as a full-time employee. Back to job-hunting !

Its just over year since Yahoo! launched Kickstart in beta but as of now (probably just a few hours back), its already closed.

Kickstart was a Yahoo initiative to compete with Facebook, Linkedin etc but focused specifically on college students, alumni etc to connect them to jobs (professional networking space) to kickstart careers.

Right now, Kickstart shows "Thanks for trying Kickstart ! Please check out Yahoo! HotJobs for your job search needs." and links to their hotjobs site.
Given the economy slowdown, Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition disagreement, Facebook buyout failure and Y! 360 not catching up, they definitely seem to want to focus on revenue generating products instead.

So I've been real busy on Wednesday night. Believe it or not, on that night I was dodging bullets in colaba causeway at the bomb-blast site near Nariman House.
I at my client's office which is right next to the Taj hotel and had left office at about 11pm with my client. We were trying to cross the blast site that happened an hour before when all of a sudden there was firing and was in the middle of crossfire. Apparently the bullets were originating from the 3rd or 4th floor of Nariman House. Though this could have been easily mistaken for police firing back. I was literally running for life !
Q: And why was I trying to cross the blast site ? A: In order to reach my friend's house 1km down that lane for shelter as CST station was attacked too and there was no means to commute by train or taxi. Nor was any hotel taking in any new guests. Plus, the level of the intensity of the situation was underestimated at the time.
I dont know how the hell it happened, but my phone's camera got dysfunctional !

That proabably was my most terrifying 2 hours of my life. As Im typing this, Narman House encounter is almost one with !

Related News Links :

• Commandos storm Jewish center in Mumbai
• Commandos target Jewish centre
• Commandos abseil onto Bombay Jewish Centre
• Countdown for hostages
• Tears as the city of joy burns

The World Economy has taken a real hit. But this hasn't slowed down IT innovation especially in open-source. Jonathan of Sun has mentioned that this is the time when more of open-source would be adopted with the obvious reason of cutting down cost on proprietary software. Even though the gradual change to open-source software would be hard to gulp down so soon, it would be the only solution to keep their business from going out of business. The current crisis has not stopped IT giants from motivating tech enthusiasts from coding. A couple of contests are currently running which are worth mentioning :

• Cisco Developer Contest : http://www.cisco.com/web/solutions/axpdev/index.html
• Nokia : http://www.callingallinnovators.com/enter.asp
• Sun Code for Freedom Contest (for Indian Students only) : http://in.sun.com/communities/univ/codeforfreedom/

The easiest way to upload a large number of files to your website hosting server is to zip the files first on your local PC, upload the zip file to your hosting account and then use a shell command like unzip to extract. Unfortunately, most shared hosting environments don't provide shell access due to security reasons. But from a business perspective, users who require shell access access would be really requiring a custom setup on a dedicated server.

But if you have an entire directory of files to upload to your shared hosting account, there is still a way to extract the contents online using a simple PHP script. For this to work you got to have PHP 5.2 or later enabled.

<?php
if (isset($_GET['f']))
 $file = $_GET['f'];
else
 die("arg 1 required");

$zip = new ZipArchive;

if ($zip->open($file) === FALSE)
 die("Failed to open $file");

if (!$zip->extractTo('.'))
 echo "Extract not successful";
else
 echo "Extract successful";

$zip->close();
?>

1. Zip the folder on your local PC using WinZip or whatever (say sample.zip).
2. Upload the zip file sample.zip via FTP to your host (say in temp folder).
3. Upload the PHP file unzip.php to temp folder.
4. Enter in your browser the following address http://mywebsite.com/temp/unzip.php?f=sample.zip
5. If you look in your host server's temp folder, you should see the contents of sample.zip extracted.

One issue you would face is the owner permissions of that extracted directory. Since the extract part was done by a script, the owner of that folder would be apache instead of your username. The only workaround of this is to login to your web control panel, browse files and reset ownership of that folder. For example, in a control panel like DirectAdmin you could just Browse for files and click on Recursively.

At one particular restaurant in Tamil Nadu, I came across a Viagara Milkshake listed on the menu under the "Ice Creams" section !

And no, I didn't order it !

This year I'm slowly making a transition to Linux. Though I cannot leave Windows behind as I am too accustomed to it, I intend to spend a lot of time on Linux to be able to get a very good grip of it.

I've started off with Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit edition and so far it has been pretty exciting. I've seen many linux users say that we should not think Windows when moving to GUI Linux like Ubuntu - but reality is, Windows GUI has more than 90% marketshare and most people don't like spending time finding alternatives. If Windows users could just seamlessly resume their work on Linux, it would be an ideal solution. So from a practical point of view, Windows users should be able to find most of their stuff on Linux desktops. For example, the "Windows key" is used on Windows PCs to access the Start menu. In Ubuntu this is not the default, but this can be changed in Keyboard Shortcuts (Windows Key is referred to as the "SuperKey" in Linux). On the other hand, to quickly access the desktop using the keyboard, Ubuntu's default is CTRL+ALT+D. And so far I haven't found a solution to making it Windows Key + D. While it doesn't bother me & many other Linux fans to use the new combination, it seems to be a pain for many users - only because of the fact that their fingers are already synchronized to it & hence prefer it that way. I don't want to keep ranting about what can be done in Windows & that can't be done in Linux.

But there are 2 good reasons to try out Linux this year :

• Wine 1.0 - after nearly 15 years in development, the stable version of Wine got released - for running Windows exe files. But this still yet to work with all EXEs.
• OpenOffice 3.0 - Support for MS Office 2007 formats and since ver 2.2 no more long startup times which was terrible when compared to MS Office which runs natively unlike OO which is Java dependent.