Friday, June 09, 2006

Google - the Mother of Invention

Google finally started its war on MS - atleast it seems so.

Google recently revealed its version of the Spreadsheet program - an important ingredient of MS's Office Suite of products. Though as of now, the application is more like a spreadsheet collaboration tool for the web. Using the tool, users can share spreadsheets online and make changes/additions so that the data remains consistent. Also, users don't need to store these spreadsheets on their machines - they can be stored on the Google servers!!! This service is a Beta version as of now, so it doesn't have those many functionalities. But they will be added soon - Google can be trusted on that. Its currently open only by invitations - check it out at: http://spreadsheets.google.com

Some time back, there were rumours about Google coming up with a new architecture that would allow users to directly login into a network, without an OS. I think this is Google's first move towards accomplishing the mission.

While browsing through Google Labs, I also came across Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends). This is also in the Beta version, but has the potential to become an extremely powerful tool for Marketing people. It takes as input two items (commodities) and displays a graph listing the times the items were searched for on Google as a percentage of total searches on Google. It also shows the number of times the items were in use; also highlighting major news events at the peaks of the graph.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

A Bad Weekend ...

Just when the weekend looked gr8 for me, the news came a as a bolt from the heavens that the AP govt. has banned "The Da Vinci Code" in the state. This happened just one day before the opening of the movie. Shouldn't the govt. care about how much money various organizations have put in the promotions of the movie? And is the govt. so indecisive? - first it tells Sony Pictures to incorporate a disclaimer that the movie is a work of fiction and clears the movie release and then just after a week, following the TN govt's ban, bans the movie.

So I ask, when my friends in Pune and Bangalore are enjoying the movie, why should I, staying in Hyderabad, be devoid of the fun? What happened to the equality of Indians?

Its turning out to be a bad weekend. After the AP govt. decided not to let me watch the movie, I came to the lab - hoping to practice the SAP MM package. But now the server is down. Phew !!