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Google Ads

Hopefully, You guys have noticed it, We have been running Google Ads on our website for slightly over a month now. The run has been great with Google Ads bringing quite some revenue (a year's website hosting costs covered already). Google pays by Click Through Ratio of the ads. What this means is that it won't pay for the number of impressions but instead will pay for the clicks on these ads. So for e.g. you had 50 impressions and only 5 people clicked the ads, you will get money for only 5 clicks. Now, we've not quite understood how Google calculates Click-Through amount to be given. It varies all the time it seems.

A very cool feature of Google Ads are the content specific ads. So for same javascript code that Google supplies you when you register for Google Adsense program, you get different ads on different pages. Well, this is expected of Google.

One more thing we can make out is that if the content is stagnant for some time, the revenues start dropping off. This is because the readership falls when we don't write anything new. So we now have one more motive to keep blogging.

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Feels Great !!

Thanks to the wonderful guys at AWP, couple of days back I received the "Developing Microsoft Office Solutions : Answers for Office 2003, Office XP, Office 2000, and Office 97" book by Ken Bluttman. This is another book that I reviewed for AWP and it feels great seeing your name in the book. Needless to say, this book upholds the great technical content we all are familiar with coming out of AWP.

The book is very detailed and has very good coverage of Microsoft Office Object Models, Smart Tags and Infopath. The various case studies like, Generating "on-the-fly" Excel charts from imported XML data, Using InfoPath to overcome key XML processing limitations etc makes it even more worthier of a purchase.

I have written a more detailed review (slightly biased..:)) of this book under the Book Reviews section.

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E-mail Escalation: Dispute Exacerbating Elements of Electronic Communication

HBS Working Knowledge points to an interesting paper on how E-Mails impact the process of conflict management and how the best way to resolve a dispute is to pick up the phone or just walkover and resolve the dispute face-to-face.

Why is it that e-mail emboldens people to new heights of rudeness, combativeness, and off-the-cuff stupidity? Why do small conflicts escalate into huge problems when e-mail is involved? Those questions are asked and answered in this paper by conflict expert Ray Friedman, a professor at Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. Friedman says that when we meet face-to-face, disputes are often safely negotiated thanks to our ability to interpret voice intonations, physical mannerisms, and facial expressions. That context is missing as we sit isolated in front of our computer launching pointed digital missives, which no amount of symbols can blunt. The answer? Handle your disputes by walking down the hallway and talking them out.

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...India emerged as a great economic power...

Good to know, India is now getting recognised as Great Economic Power. Always On Ten top trends of 2003 places India at no. 3.

3. India emerged as a great economic power -- at last. Which country has the world's second biggest middle class? Not Germany. Not Japan. Not Russia. India.

Among its 1 billion consumers, anywhere from 150 million to 300 million are certifiably middle class and can afford a simple car or motorbike, electric appliances, perhaps a home. Of course, there is huge and desperate poverty, but India is rapidly growing and climbing out of slough.

For years after it gained independence from Britain in 1947, India was a massive pain to the United States, leaning to the left in politics and economics, throwing up trade barriers, severely limiting U.S. investment, and generally acting superior. Much of that has started to change, and India, while still socialist, is moving closer to the middle of the road. It also has been building a famously first-class education system, turning out tens of thousands of technological experts who work in the home country and throughout the world.

Now Indian workers are taking more and more jobs from America, and there could be some confrontations ahead, with U.S. labor demanding some form of protection.

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Happy New Year

A Very Happy and Prosperous New Year to all of you !!

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The Rise Of India

Kiruba points to this cover story on Business week on how Indian brainpower is reshaping the Corporate America. Definitely a good read and what looks like an unbiased view on Outsourcing. It's not just software now, but much more.

The gains in efficiency could be tremendous. Indeed, India is accelerating a sweeping reengineering of Corporate America. Companies are shifting bill payment, human resources, and other functions to new, paperless centers in India.

Another article talks about how India Is Raising Its Sights At Last. I really like the last paragraph of this article:

India's transformation is still a work in progress. The problems of illiteracy, poor infrastructure, and bad government persist. But something else is there, too: self-confidence. By 2015, 55% of Indians will be under the age of 20, and this generation will have grown up in an economy where roads like the Pune highway are the rule, not the exception. Unlike the generation before them, young Indians are no longer obsessed with India's poverty, but with its future. They give India a fighting chance.

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Case Study: Amazon.com

Amazon is one of the very few companies I admire and Amazon.com is one of the very few websites I use to do my shopping and research.

In October, for the first time in its eight-year history, Amazon.com posted a profitable quarter that wasn't driven by holiday shopping—and its stock price continues to climb. But to keep growing, Amazon will need to wield more clout offline. A look at its untested new strategy to offer back-end online services to other retailers offers insights into how to profit from IT assets.

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Something on SOA

Just as I thought that I have scoured everything on SearchWebServices, I land up on a blog pointing to this SOA Learning Guide. This has everything you want to know and understand about SOA.

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Alive and Kicking !

OK. It has been quite a while since we blogged. Just to let you guys know that we have been to India and back but this time to Harrisburg, PA. Right now we are neck deep in work(.Net/OLAP etc) but things should start getting normal in few weeks time. No promises this time but we have all intentions to keep on blogging. So stay tuned.

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Developers sink 'waterfall' in favor of 'sync'

SearchWebServices.com writes:

What was clear from the research is that a majority of developers are undertaking projects that use the so-called "sync-and-stabilize" approach, in which members of a development project work on modular blocks and then synchronize their code with other members on a regular basis throughout the life of the project. It also requires that they stabilize, or debug, that work on a continual basis as well.

In a study of 150 software projects conducted jointly by MIT, Harvard Business School, the University of Pittsburgh and Hewlett-Packard Co., 64% of developers worldwide said they worked on projects in modules. A majority also produced "builds" -- or individually coded components -- on a daily basis in the early or middle stages of a project. The rates were 63% in the United States, 57% in Europe and 53% in Japan. The exception was India, where only 27% of developers were in the daily-build habit.

The interesting part is the last line above. In India, many of us are still developing using Waterfall model whereas others have moved to more evolutionary models.

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XML in the Real Real World

Tim Gray writes in this article on XML-Journal:

There seem to be two kinds of XML-based initiatives out there. In the first, they don't bother too much with the niceties, they just focus on getting some things put together and happening, they make up and refine the messages as they go along, and they've been in production now for six months. The second kind takes a more carefully structured approach, builds things from the schemas out, worries a lot about choreography and data modeling and semantics, and is still in the planning stage, with the revised schedule calling for deployment two quarters from now if things go well.

That's lot of dejected talk from someone who co-authored XML recommendation. Anyways, Tim points to the continuous revolution(s) taking place in the RSS world which seems to be the greatest success story of XML so far. He writes:

Meanwhile, the biggest story in the XML world is happening just off the radar of the prognosticators and executives. It's called RSS, and it's a simple format for pumping the content of dynamic information sources around. It was invented for use by the legions of webloggers, but it's mainstream now; I no longer surf to the New York Times or the BBC or MSDN, I subscribe to them, and when something changes, I get a nice little summary and decide whether I want to check it out.

RSS has never actually been blessed as a standard, and its development has been fraught with nasty personalities and politics. There are competing versions, and the next-generation version probably won't be called RSS. But it's changing the world, and it's based on XML, and it's coming from a direction that nobody's looking in. Stand by.


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Google News Alerts

Google launches Google News Alerts:

Google News Alerts are sent by email when news articles appear online that match the topics you specify.

Some handy uses of Google News Alerts include:

  • monitoring a developing news story

  • keeping current on a competitor or industry

  • getting the latest on a celebrity or event

  • keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

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    Introducing BPEL4WS 1.0

    Well, BPEL4WS was introduced last year and has already gone into version 1.1 draft release but this article on Web Services Journal provides a very good introduction of BPEL4WS and shows how it builds on the features offered by WS-Coordination and WS-Transaction.

    BPEL4WS is at the top of the WS-Transaction stack and utilizes WS-Transaction to ensure reliable execution of business processes over multiple workflows, which BPEL4WS logically divides into two distinct aspects. The first is a process description language with support for performing computation, synchronous and asynchronous operation invocations, control-flow patterns, structured error handling, and saga-based long-running business transactions. The second is an infrastructure layer that builds on WSDL to capture the relationships between enterprises and processes within a Web services-based environment.

    Taken together, these two aspects support the orchestration of Web services in a business process, where the infrastructure layer exposes Web services to the process layer, which then drives that Web services infrastructure as part of its workflow activities.

    The ultimate goal of business process languages like BPEL4WS is to abstract underlying Web services so that the business process language effectively becomes the Web services API. While such an abstract language may not be suitable for every possible Web services-based scenario it will certainly be useful for many, and if tool support evolves it will be able to deliver on its ambition to provide a business analyst-friendly interface to choreographing enterprise systems.

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    Six Kinds of Jelly Beans

    This article - "Six Kinds of Jelly Beans: How the Perception of Variety Influences Consumption" on Knowledge@Wharton (free registration reqd) discusses how visual perception of activity and an abundance of choices ultimately increase consumption.

    The normal economic model would be that you eat when you are hungry or that you buy things that you need and that you don’t buy things that you don’t need. But we don’t think people really know how to eat today – they look for cues. And most people don’t realize that an assortment of a product encourages them to take more. We are all mindlessly making a lot of decisions.

    A very interesting study.

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    The future of XML documents and relational databases

    Jon Udell discusses the future of XML documents and relational databases. Good article on the changes happening in the RDBMS world where every Vendor is including more support for XML. The article also discusses the XML document Workflow and how in the process XML enhances the data by carrying contextual metadata.

    Imagine a purchase order flowing through a business process some time in 2005. It's an XML document, created with a tool such as InfoPath, carrying a mixture of core data and contextual metadata. The core data, including the item number and department code, will wind up in the columns of a relational table. The contextual metadata, which might include a threaded discussion made from comments injected by the requester, the reviewer, and the approver, will remain in document form. "This human context is never stored in the RDBMS today," says Kingsley Idehen, CEO of Burlington, Mass.-based OpenLink. Yet it's the key to understanding how the data got there and what it means.

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    We are back

    Notwithstanding, We've not blogged for quite some time now, almost two months. That's a long-long time in the Blog world. Well, the reasons are many. During this timeframe we moved back to India and now are concentrating on wrapping our current assignments. Not sure what we will do next but have all hopes that it will be something related to .Net. It was a welcome break nonetheless. The longer time we spend outside India, the more it seems, India changes. More on that later, Stay tuned.

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    Weekend Link-o-mania

    For the last few weeks, things have been crazy at work. I have not been able to devote as much time to blogging as I would like. Although this will continue for some time, I thought of doing something different. So, taking a leaf out of Sam Gentile's "New and Notable" posts, here are few pointers that will keep you and myself even more busy. All of these are excellent reads. So here we go:

    • Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee against the evil of SPAM.

    • Kevin Werbach is anticipating a post-Web, post-PC world,
      Technologists just can't stop thinking about tomorrow. The future always looks bright; the question is who and what will help get us there. Even the grinding downturn of the past three years has hardly dampened this belief among entrepreneurs, technology executives and investors. Will broadband be the hot new development that lifts us out of the doldrums? Will it be Wi-Fi? Online gaming? Web services? Homeland security? Those are the wrong questions.

      If you want to know where you are, you don't study a map to determine where you're going. You trace back the steps from where you've been. Over the past several years, "where we've been" in the technology world has changed. While we were all focused on the dot-com bubble and the subsequent bust, "yesterday" shifted. It used to be the PC revolution and client-server computing in the enterprise; now it's the Web.


    • Rob High of IBM talks on Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). This is another acronym buzzing around the industry and this conversation highlights the basics of SOA. I missed attending a talk on the same topic last month by Drew Robbins in the Columbus .Net Developers Group meeting. He has posted the presentation on his blog.

    • Kalsey provides a web interface to the Bill Zeller's button maker application. Cool. While at Kalsey's website, Check out the CSS tabs with Submenu's blog which is the best I have also seen.

    • Wes Haggard shows how to determine the .Net Framework version by retrieving the current Framework Directory. Also check out the comments for even more straight forward way of doing the same.

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    Cavaliers win LeBron James sweepstakes

    LeBron will be playing for Cleveland Cavaliers (which tied for the NBA League's worst record with Denver Nuggets). This is such good news for Cleveland Fans (count me in too). Cleveland is not that bad team as the numbers indicate and inclusion of LeBron can (and will) turn the tables for them. They have had some really great games last season (one that stands out is when they held LA Lakers to their lowest score this season).

    For the uninitiated ones, LeBron is just 16 and is slated to be the top pick for this year's NBA Draft. He could very well be the next Michael Jordan. Have doubts, check this out and this.