Great to see a lot of entrepreneurial activity in the Indian software industry. NEN has been doing a great job of bringing people together to create visibility for startups.

From a country with great engineering talent and high visibility into the global software industry, it should be certain and sooner that world-class products start coming out. Check out the startups, vote for them, if you find something really interesting.

For those of you interested in nominating your company or your friends, the nominations for the contese closes on Oct 22.

Those of you who visited Java.com or other sites of Sun Microsystems might have noticed a promotional game called myPicks Beijing 2008. This game was developed by Pramati for promotion of Sun’s launch of a new product called Zembly. The game was launched on Facebook to not only demonstrate the use of Zembly as a social applications platform but also spread word about this new offering to a large base of Facebook users. The viral elements of the game, high Olympics spirit and some word of mouth marketing using Tell-a-Friend widget, led to easier spread and indirect promotion of the newly launched product.

If you are curious about what the game does, play the game at Facebook while the Games are on, or watch this youtube video.

An example of how Social Media and Social Networks can be used in marketing.

Web does not exclude anyone. While most web 2.0 sites/services are targeting the young, BigscreenLive brings a special service for senior citizens.

UI challenge of creating an interface for seniors is big. We had a great time working with BigScreenLive team in developing it. For developers on the project, putting themselves in the user’s shoe was not easy. After all an apparently simple task might be challenging for seniors. The touch screen interface was also a new for the team. Pramati team had good learning on how to make software interface easy to use. The BigScreenLive team was great to work with on this very interesting project.

Another highlight of the project was use of Ruby on Rails. ROR came very handy in this case where the requirements were extremely loose. It helped us iterate very fast, quick to and fro, and sometimes bring changes in less than 3 days.

Read product review here.

Pramati Technologies recently signed an OEM Agreement with NETGEAR, Inc. Under this agreement Dekoh Media Sharing Platform will be shipped with ReadyNAS product targeted at home consumers market. Home users who are experiencing explosive growth in their digital photo collection can buy ReadyNAS ($399 on Amazon now for 500GB) and they will get easy-to-use ReadNAS Photos, which is rebranded and customized Dekoh Photos.

Users can easily import, organize and transfer photos on their PC to their NAS storage for lifelong archival and also sharing with friends or family. Dekoh Photos will enable users to selectively share photos with who they want and no software installation is required for those who would see the pictures and they would be served directly out of NAS.

For those of you technical, who would like to know why Dekoh, here are a few key points:

• Dekoh simplifies setup required to make NAS content accessible from outside internet, even when the NAS is behind firewall or DSL (no static IP address). Earlier, home users had to install additional open source software, obtain dynamic IP, open ports, etc.
• Dekoh gives better user experience with its Ajax interface, which today’s web 2.0 users have come to expect. NAS by itself has limited CPU power and memory for sophisticated user tools.

More in my next posting on Dekoh architecture and how it can play a central role at digital homes where device-PC-Web should come together for better user experience.

More and more, hardware vendors are finding that Web 2.0 technologies can be a good way to improve the end user experience of their devices…read posting by Om Malik.

L1 platform. Loosely coupled REST/SOAP based API integration. Example: Flickr API.

L2 platform. More deeper integration of developer’s application injecting into the platform UI. Example: Facebook API.

L3 platform. A runtime that hosts developer code. Example: Ning.

Marc’s argument that L3 platform are the best, is certainly questionable and Josh makes points in this line. While a scalable web platform with Social Networking API is a powerful one, expecting others to bring their users and user data to your hosted platform is not in the best interest of the company/group that wants to add those features to an existing site/application.

A better solution could be a add-on social networking platform with API which the company/group can co-host and integrate. They get to keep their users and user data and can achieve better integration.

This is like a “Web 2.0 Application Server” as shown in the picture below. Deployed alongside the current Web 1.0 website and can provide social networking features overlayed on top of it.

Would this be more acceptable to those currently on using web as a Web1.0 platform and would like to add social networking among their users (use web as a Web2.0 platform)?

Desktop integration helps websites and consumer brands increase interaction with the user and offer valuable and timely alerts that can benefit the user. As long as the user has control on receiving such alerts and these widgets don’t mess up the computer (desktop icon, startup program, tray icon etc.), it serves a great purpose for the user. These widgets act as agents on behalf of the user to filter content and bring useful information periodically.
Technorati Tags: Desktop, Dekoh, Desktop Widget

Writing applications using markup instead of platform-API-based code is so much more easier. Browser-based UI brings significant advantage of using combined teams with programmers (who generally can’t build great looking UI) and graphics and UI specialists (who can’t wire it up with the backend). The last decade of focus for developers has largely been on building to the web. The programming model and the deployment environment are all too familiar.

A browser-based application need not necessarily mean a hosted application, when a desktop runtime such as Dekoh can serve to your local browser. You have the twin advantage of a common environment for quickly building to the desktop (and web) as well as a fluent integration between the such desktop applications with existing web applications. The best way to build web-desktop integrated applications of the future.

Technorati Tags: Desktop, RIA, Rich Internet Applications, Dekoh

While it appears cool at first look, it needs to be analyzed in detail. Here are some initial questions that needs to be answered:

1. Does the user have control over deciding which applications to make offline? How much data should be available offline?
2. Does the offline functionality run in-process (in the browser)? If it runs in-process is there a chance of browser bloating up in memory due to offline caching or run slow?
3. What about security? Is it possible for a rogue application to cache and use background threads to connect to their site just because the user visited the website and the Javascript accessing Google gears got loaded?
4. Does Google gear intercept all HTTP requests going out of the browser? If I am offline and just type google.com/mail how does it capture this request and present me with offline content?
5. It appears the offline functionality is going to work only for pure Javascript applications. How does it work when application has other tiers like Java, PHP, Ruby….?
6. Writing applications to handle connection status and gracefully transition is going to be a programming  challenge (nightmare).

Interesting to note Adobe Apollo support for Google gears (or viceversa). “Kevin Lynch, senior vice president and chief software architect at Adobe, said his company will join Google in the effort to develop a standard cross-platform, cross-browser local storage capability. The Gears API will be available in Adobe’s Apollo tool that enables Web applications to run on the desktop, he added.”. I thought they did not accept this - Adobe Apollo - On A Collision Course With Web Browsers