The Great Connector ,Stan Relihan

Note from Ajay-

Stan Relihan is the 40th most connected person list on LinkedIn out of 25 million people.His podcast: http://connections.thepodcastnetwork.com gets more than 12,000 downloads a month and he has leveraged social networking to maximum advantage for building great assets as well as increasing his own business value. Here he shares some insights  on using social networking networks.

1) What’s the latest trend you see in community sites over the next year and next three to five years.

I see more and more emphasis on the need to focus on Business outcomes -not just idle chit-chat or frivolous questions. Social Networking sites will also need to truly embrace the Web 2.0 ethos – where what the users want is ultimately more important that what the site owner / operators think it should be.  This means more responsiveness to requests for new features and more transparency & intercommunication from management with their users. In the end, just like with Search Engines & Operating Systems, many will cease to exist – and only a few dominant players will continue.

Continue reading “The Great Connector ,Stan Relihan”

Yahoo – A new product beginning

Preview of the Google Maps competitor – Yahoo Fire Eagle .

Things we liked and things we didnot-

Automating your Windows

Here is a great and free scripting tool called AutoIT .

You can send mouse and keyboard events, windows to open, its quite simple and powerful. A prtial list of features from the site is below.

“AutoIt v3 is a freeware BASIC-like scripting language designed for automating the Windows GUI and general scripting. It uses a combination of simulated keystrokes, mouse movement and window/control manipulation in order to automate tasks in a way not possible or reliable with other languages (e.g. VBScript and SendKeys). AutoIt is also very small, self-contained and will run on all versions of Windows out-of-the-box with no annoying “runtimes” required!

AutoIt was initially designed for PC “roll out” situations to reliably automate and configure thousands of PCs. Over time it has become a powerful language that supports complex expressions, user functions, loops and everything else that veteran scripters would expect.

Features:

SAS -Silverlight Champion – Alan Churchill

st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) }

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:”Times New Roman”;}

Alan Churchill

Leading SAS and .Net Expert ,

MS Silverlight Evangelist

Analytics Entrepreneur and Mentor to SAS Consultants

1) What’s the latest trend you see in Computer Programming over the next
year and next three to five years.

Silverlight and Flex will be huge and will really enable much more SaaS. The current web simply needs wholesale replacement to make it more usable for business applications. These new RIAs will allow us, as developers, to take it to a whole new level. Expect a massive influx of dollars into web redesign and redevelopment.

2) Tell us how you came in this field of work, and what factors made
you succeed.

I got into computers in high school (this was very early computing). I loved the sense of challenge that computers offered: they were a big crossword puzzle. I succeeded because I never viewed a problem the way a typical computer person or scientist would view them. As a history guy, I took a more holistic approach to problems. Heck, if you don’t know about a particular theory, you won’t be constrained by it. If you do know it, sometimes ignore it to get the job done, even if it isn’t as pretty. Continue reading “SAS -Silverlight Champion – Alan Churchill”

Analytics through the Browser : Strata

image

Here is an interesting concept of a data browser called Strata by a company called Kirix ( http://www.kirix.com/ ). It promises to connect your online , offfline data and help you perform analytics on it. It has a 30 days trial version . I am currently evaluating and will keep you posted.

This is one more example of analytics moving online ,from packaged software .

Knowledge by Google :Knol

A recnet product by Google is Knol (http://knol.google.com) . A knol is a unit of knowledge. As you can see from the features below, it is more like a wikipedia , or a collbrative scholarly tool . It has customized options for the kind of license you want, your self rating , viewer’s rating, collbration enabled or not. An extremely nifty tool, but hosted by the big G will have its share of suspicions among the academic community. Here is the snapshot of an empty knol page.And here is a link to a knol created by me at http://knol.google.com/k/ajay-ohri/data-mining-through-cloud-computing/d8o4tiw9xa68/3

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Windows Live (Writer and Maps)

This post is being written using the offline blogging tool by Microsoft called Windows Live Writer. How good is it…? Its pretty near, no messy edges here.The ability to copy and past from the clipboard also makes it a welcome edition rather than waiting for the WP upload .And the formatting is really nicely done ,as by now we are more used to Win Word typing than anything else.

image Continue reading “Windows Live (Writer and Maps)”