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14 June 2013#

iRadio, successor of GrooveShark?

Grooveshark is one of my favourite destinations on the web to listen to music. Created with adobe flex, it sports an really clear cool UI. It truly doesn’t feel that you are listening to your tunes on the browser.

Jailbroken iOS device has an app
This is not surprising, as the app store guidelines wouldn’t let apps which could have piracy concern. In established markets like US, i believe the music producers gets paid every time a user plays a song on grooveshark.

Grooveshark gets its revenue from ad supported in free version and subscription fee from ad free accounts.

oflate, i have been using their browser based app for touch devices; it is a great experience, one of the few that deliver the promises of HTML5;
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Why am i writing about Grooveshark which has been there for a long time now and is well established.
iRadio WWDC 2013 keynote is the reason

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iRadio is just another Grooveshark; its the same. I couldn’t see any difference except the potential to kill the latter. This has always happened in the industry for ages; the pioneers of a technology or product losing to the new kid on the block; What’s going to happen to Grooveshark and its likes. Fall is coming!!

26 May 2013#

One Terabyte in Flickr ?

All new flickr

All new flickr

Some Quick thoughts around what this could mean in the future?
1. Will it try to become another social media site around photos? If it does, it will die.
2. Flickr groups are better than fb fan pages. Will it make the groups better.
3. Ads on the side – Trying to remember if flickr had ads before. But i do see a bigger ad on the right top. More ads in future?
4. Backup of original photos (free now). I wouldn’t worry about the good clicks from the yester years saved on my external hard disk anymore!

28 February 2013#

Remembering 176 x 208

It was 2007, when i first started and was introduced to the mobile platform at Hexolabs (http://www.hexolabs.com). At that time, i was working on Symbian devices (Nokia N70, my phone at that time was the test device the games that we built)

176 x 208

. It was the golden era for Nokia, with the largest market share and was doing its best in India.

Later came the days of iPhone, Nexus Phones powered by Android. Enter Samsung. and things have changed a lot since then; I’m still looking at the screen resolution and screen sizes almost everyday at work; As someone who has been working on the small screens, the numbers 176 x 208 has been growing ever since, but i’m still faced with the same situation; What are we designing for? Yes, i understand fluid design is the solution; And there are remains many more questions other that the native or not? Is it better to focus on iOS first and then move to android? Can we use a framework, which lets us package into both worlds? But, the screen resolution is still probably my favorite.

I still remember what Mr. Raja Manohar, Founder Hexolabs interactive used to say even before Nokia lost its market share
“Nokia should focus on one smart phone” or with a single screen size/resolution that would make it easier for app developers to work on. This was the time when the best phones in the market were still Nokia E72 and N90.

Here we are with crazy sizes and resolution; Samsung’s most expensive tablet in market Note 800 has resolution of 1280×800; iPad 3′s resolution 2048-by-1536; Micromax funbook P500 1024 x 600 600??

But can’t stop wondering about the world with a one single screen resolution for a product category; What does it really mean? I don’t fully understand. But, seems things would be lot simpler; right from comparing which phone to buy. What do you guys think?

17 February 2013#

Thirumullaivasal


Gallery
http://www.sathyanvelumani.com/photography/thirumullaivasal/

7 November 2012#

Learning with interactions – US Election 2012 and nytimes.com

Web experience has been changing, and it has been proved again and again that we learn more when we interact with the information. With Windows 8 and the cheaper touch technologies it is not hard to imagine that we would be interacting with every single on screen element on a web page.

For someone, like me in India who doesn’t even know about electrol votes, swing states, where florida is in US
www.nytimes.com changed everything with the amazing interactive infographics of the presidential election 2012
Here are the screen shots below;

The most impressive part of the who interaction was the SCENARIO; during the process of counting, it let the users to select the scenario of the democras/republicans winning a state and seeing the way in which it would turn the election. Thank you, creators of the interactions, it is one of my best web learning experience. Learning with Interactions

Lately, i have been learning the basics of Java again through ‘Karel learns to program java’ – CS106A –
programming methodologies class online. I’m more interested than i was when i was learning it in college during my bachelor’s. Flash certainly did change the way we look at information; letting the users interact with the information.

It is exciting to imagine the possibilities of gestures and the possibilities of interactions with information beyond the realms of Mobiles and desktop computers.

26 October 2012#

Mobile SIMs in Meter boxes – POWER

Yes, Mobile SIMs will be everywhere; even in unimaginable places? Can you think of any?

Yesterday, on the train to Ganiyari, Chattisgarh met Mr.??? Didn’t get his name. working for Easun Reyrolle , leader in the field of electrical power management and learned that he manages a project in Gwalior fitting Power boxes (There must be a better name?, this is a quickpost, will get back to it later) which uses GPRS and updates the consumption to the server. He also added that ‘unlike GSM which only helps pull this data, GPRS pushes the data to the server allowing the power companies to track min-min consumption of individuals, and companies.

The states of Punjab, Uttarkhand, UP have actively been pursuing these power projects replacing the easily tampered power meters of the yester years.On questioning whether Easun Reyrolle is the only manufacturer of these system, he answered no, and that the competition is big.

Proving the point that Mobile SIMs would someday outnumber the world poplulation and we would have mobile UIDs which are present in our everyday devices ACs, Refrigerations, Household Electricals allowing us to control their usage through cool mobile UIs (mostly Android devices, unless Apple brings down its iOS phones).

A year and half back, still in my previous work as Design Researcher for a Research Consulting firm working on a problem ‘Tackling the Power Theft Problem’ for a major Power Company.

A workshopping excercise in the design public conclave gathered teams to come up with ‘New Ideas Around Power theft’
More here: http://designpublic.in/blog/new-ideas-around-power-theft/

Concepts for curbing power theft
The teams came up with different solutions [link to the blog post from designpublic here] With one of the ideas to use the image of gods and goddess on the meter to address to the god fearing power thieves; Mobile IDs would be the watch dog of the future, and we may be the world would be spending more to stay away from it.

6 August 2012#

Kargi Road Station

Kargi Road Station, is one of the smallest of the railway stations where the passing train won’t ever stop for more than 2 mins. I was on a visit to the JSS, Ganiyari to understand more about the In Patient Module and CHW(Community Health Worker) module and was on my way to Shivtarai sub-center to understand.

To know more about what i do here

This being my second visit JSS ended up shorter than originally planned and was ready to leave on train on 5th, Utkal Expresss from Bilaspur RAilway station to New Delhi.

IRCTC.co.in with alexa traffic rank 441, , is always down. I have never been successful in booking tatkal tickets online ever. I had decided that i would go to the Kargi Road Station, with the assumption that it would be empty and i would be successful in getting the ticket. I reached the station exactly 11 am when tatkal booking starts(starts 10 am in bigger stations such as Bilaspur) , and was the first in the queue. The man in the counter would have been around 45 years old wearing a nicely pressed white shirt , comfortably sititng showing that he had everything he needed to get the job done.

His first attempt to log in into the railway network failed, cursing the gods, he called his colleague and figured out what needs to be done to get the system working again. It was the usual. Manual shutdown by holding the power button and kicking the system back on. The system was on now, and he started running around looking for something in all the registers around the table. After 5 mins, he found what he was looking for, the login id and password. He tried logging in to the system for 7-8 times, by now, he had another person assisting him.

By this time, the queue got bigger and bigger and i had my work team coming from the hospital in a jeep to pick me enroute to the subcenter. I suggested that he check the CAPSLOCK , if it was on by mistake. It was. Few in the queue showered short praises for the thought and i was again hoping to get my tickets. My first tatkal ticket, was a near dream now; he calls his friend now to tell him that the system is back working. Surely an achievement for the day, 2 mins goes away. When he came to my form after completing couple of cancellations, which could have been done later. The waiting list for 3AC and Sleeper were now 5 and 16. And when he tried booking, the system didn’t let him do it. The jeep came and i had to leave.

I did end up getting on the train the next day, which was 2 hours late; Got into the sleeper, and found a comfortable place near the door of S7, spent 6 hours sitting and sleeping before paying the extra fare and got a sleeper berth to spend the next 18 odd hours thinking about the interface which didn’t tell the user that CAPSLOCK was ON and the service provider who took his own sweet time and didn’t realize that time was what he had that day and the customer’s didn’t.

It was an experience. Kargi Road STation, i realized is one of the most beautiful stations i have ever been to. With a small grass covered hill on one side and a small station with a single counter. The super fast trains don’t stop, but Utkal express from bilaspur did stop there on my way to New delhi.

Next time, i visit JSS hospital, i have decieded to spend a good sunday afternoon on the railways station and may be climb the small hill for some pictures of the station

6 June 2012#

James Fort Prison

On 4 Dec 2011, I walked into the James Fort Prison, James Town, Accra, Ghana

Little History:

James Fort Prison in Accra is almost 400 years old,
and was originally built for 200 slaves. It housed over 740 male and female prisoners till the year 2007.

Now, the prison is empty with signs of its inhabitants in the walls of every cell. Below are some of the pictures and an attempt to tell you the story of what its like to be there when its empty and see all inside

If you had ever wondered, What’s like to walk inside an empty prison? Check the images below or
on Flickr

2 June 2012#

Working Proof

Sunday Market, Jama Masjid

This is what every product or project needs to sell itself.
Better than writing ‘WATER PROOF’ in bold on the package.
What do you think?

Sunday Market, Jama Masjid

Do you believe it now?

17 February 2012#

The mobile way

Kajal Dutta, is a colleague who cooks food in my office. He also works in a house as a house hold assistant and cook. His boss recently presented him with a used FUjitso Netbook and he wanted me to check if the laptop had any problems. There was no audio but we quickly fixed with installing the audio driver.

But later, Kajal wanted to learn the basics from me. so we started yesterday.
Chapter 1: What are folders? I found it difficult to define a folder for him. But, he got the idea of what a folder is. Later i gave him excercise to create folder, copy and paste files from pendrive to hard drive. There were few hiccups and took a little time to get the idea. Later he said

“Hahh, this is just like the files in mobile naa??” – Kajal Dutta.

Then, i realized the impact of mobile phones and its interface.

I realized also that Mobile phones have destroyed the inhibitions of many people who were thinking that computing were for the educated.

One of my closet friend, Senthil E who is a cab driver in chennai, doesn’t read or write in any language, but has never had problems with using any new phone. When he got his Nokie N72, the initial days he used to come with a lot of questions and always ended up lost in the menu. But, after a few days he was a champ with the phone.

Mobile has truly changed the way we look at things.

12 January 2012#

A little about me

Visual Story | Sathyan Velumani from Sathyan Velumani on Vimeo.

9 December 2011#

Why Indian Football team got disqualified?

A Tale from Ghana

There was epic football match between India and Ghana. The Indians were well known to have specialized voodoo magic and tricks. The match began and everytime, the Indian hit the ball towards the ghanian post, the ghanians saw the ball as coal pot and didn’t stop it. India was leading the game to 100-0 goals against the team of Ghana.
A Ghanian hero rised, and decided that he would not let this happen and hit the coal pot and scored a goal. A sad fate, after scoring the goal he died.
Indian team was disqualified by FIFA.

This tale has been floating around with school children of Ghana for more than 40 years now. No one knows why it was India and how it all started? But it sure is interesting.
Let me know if you know anything about it.

4 December 2011#

Celebration of Life – Kane Kwai Coffins

Wikitravel has been my favorite site these days having started to travel frequently to new places. I had taken a print out of the entire page on Accra, the capital city of Ghana. One of places mentioned was Kane Kwai Carpentary which me and my colleague Ridhima Jaiswal visited before leaving Accra for Tamale the next day.

We met Mr. Eric the grandson of the famous coffin maker, Kane Kwai who designed coffins starting with a cocoa fruit shaped coffin for one of the tribal chief Interestingly Coco Cola had made a video featuring Eric which tells the story of the coffins

Ghanians celebrate funeral in much of a grandeur and i had the opportunity to see 15 funerals being planned for the same day(3rd Dec 2011) Celebration of life; And Mr. Eric has already built his own coffin for the day. I’ll continue editing this post to add on our conversation with Mr. Eric; But that has to wait.

For now enjoy the video and share them with your friends

http://ghanacoffin.com/histoire/e_sommaire.htm

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