Coping with Information overdose

I read and browse a lot, especially when I am travelling. This means I have access to a lot of information, from newspapers to online articles to paper cuttings. I would love to capture all this information at one place, so that I can access it when and where I want, just like I do with my Internet bookmarks.

There are many tools that let you do this, but I think Spring Pad does it better than the others. Spring Pad is a free tool for iPhones and Android phones, and it also works on an iPad. Sadly, Symbian and Java Phones will have to wait to use the app, while others can use limited features through the mobile web browser. There is an alternate tool called Evernote, which you can use across all platforms, but it is still a bit behind Spring Pad.

So how do you use Spring Pad? Let’s say, you are walking on the road and come across an advertisement that has a number, an email address and some other information you would like to capture. The more conventional way would be to grab a piece of paper and pen to write down the relevant information, or maybe just photograph the ad. But with Spring Pad, you can photograph it, tag it and save it on your phone. When you come back home, log on to the website, and you can retrieve that information, even synchronise it with other phones.



If you are looking for a recipe, search for it online and press the Spring Pad button on your browser. The app then stores the recipe, the cooking time, and the ingredients you will need, so that when you are out shopping, you can check Spring Pad on the phone and see what all you have to buy.

That's not all. The Spring Pad can also integrate with your Gmail, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter accounts and create contacts from these accounts, get calendar events from your mail and send alerts to you on your Twitter account.

Just in case you hit upon an idea and can’t access the app for some reason, you can just email it to Spring Pad and it becomes a note, which you can mark or tag later. Spring Pad also allows you to share your information with friends. You can choose what to share, and they can also share information with you. You can also create notebooks from the apps section or add more notebooks such as your household budget calculator or manage your wine collection.
The possibilities are endless, and remember, Spring Pad is still in Beta.

Sure, there is nothing like a small diary and a pen. But then, this is so much better. So what are you waiting for, get yourself a free account at springpadit.com.

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The Above article appeared in the Indian Express on Sunday 25th July 2010

Save it to the Dropbox

Everyone is faced with the problem of sharing/accessing large files without having to depending on thumb drives, writing DVDs or using a remote login to download the file from your computer. I have found a solution to this problem in something called the Dropbox, and it is free.

You can download the application on to your Windows, Mac or Linux PC, or even on your iPhone or iPod Touch from dropbox.com and start using the application. Once installed, a menu will pop up for you to sign in. You can choose the 2GB free account or go for the 50GB or 100 GB paid version at a monthly payment of $9.99 and $19.99, respectively.

After you fill in your contact information, key in a strong password as your files will be stored on a remote server. The next step is to name the PC that you are installing the programme on — use a descriptive name such as My iPod or My Home PC.

All you have to do now is to save files you want to share into the Dropbox folder created on your PC. The programme works behind the scenes and sends a copy of all the files to the Dropbox server. So the next time you boot up your other PC where the application is installed under the same account, your files are downloaded there too.

But if you make a habit of saving files directly to your Dropbox folder, you will soon run out of space on the cloud and might have to explore the costlier paid options. This might be expensive, but makes sense if you are using the application for business.

Dropbox has worked very hard to ensure full compatibility to Windows and Linux Platforms and it also works seamlessly on the Mac. I am glad they have an iPod, iPhone and an iPad app, and would love to see an app for the Android and Brew platforms which are gaining ground. Till that time you can access Dropbox from any browser.
I also don’t like the fact that Dropbox currently does not allow to share a file, you have to share an entire folder with files in it. But the sharing still works wonderfully well.

Its best feature, however, is a paid one. It allows you to do unlimited undo on a file for 30 days from the last save. If you use the iPod, iPhone or iPad application, you can look at your pictures as an interactive photo gallery and even download files for offline viewing on your handheld. If you have the latest iPhone 3GS that shoots video, you can directly upload these to the account.

So if you too are faced with file sharing problems, check out Dropbox at dropbox.com

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The Above review appeared in the Indian Express, on Sunday, May 2nd 2010

Audio Box - My Music, Anywhere, Anytime

Audio Box lets you upload music to the cloud and hear it anywhere

My music collection means a lot to me, but I often end up working in different PCs at multiple locations and don’t always have access to what I like to hear. I know there are options like going to YouTube or other such sites and looking up your favourite artistes, but very offer the option of uploading your own songs and playlists.

Last week, I chanced upon a new website called Audio Box (www.audiobox.fm), one of the few that really deliver what they say. A few minutes later, I had opened my free account and started uploading mp3 files from my collection. The upload speeds were good and I was getting a full 512 kbps on my home broadband of the same bandwidth. Though the files uploaded pretty fast, I could only upload a particular batch at one time — once a batch is selected, new files can only be added after the batch is fully uploaded.

I also loved the iTunes-like interface that the player offered, and the fact that I could build my playlists, edit tags and favourite specific or multiple tracks online. Now, I could listen to my songs wherever I was without installing any software.

Though the free plan offers you a storage space of just 1GB on the cloud, you can upgrade it from anywhere between 11 GB to 151 GB by paying a monthly fee of $3.99 and $ 24.99 at either end. The costlier accounts also add API / Third Party integration, which will allow more applications around your music, mobile support and support for formats other than MP3. However, I don’t want to use Audio Box as a permanent backup for my media files or a storage dump.

Paid account holders will soon get iPhone, iPod and iPad integration as well as full integration for Android phones. Last.FM and Twitter integration will let users Twitter directly from the site. But Audio Box is not a social media application and you can’t use it to share media with your friends, unless you want to share your password with them. You also cannot download music tracks you have uploaded to Audio Box, which from my point of view is a neat feature as it will stop people from pirating music. An upcoming feature called ‘Featured in the library’ will showcase artistes and songs so that you can buy their music or listen to it for free.

For audiobox.fm to work without interruption you should have at least a 512 kbps broadband connection. Since you will be uploading and streaming the content, make sure your data plan allows you unlimited and or a high volume of downloads, otherwise you will end up paying a lot of money to your service provider.

I would, however, love to see a feature where Audio Box automatically pulls the cover art for the songs which don’t have them as well as the option to select streaming quality, in case the connection is slow.
For now, I will be closely watching and using Audio Box, waiting to see what new features they come up with

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The above review appeared in the Indian Express, Sunday April 18, 2010

Shoot the message

From podcast to videocast and now video email, the evolution has been swift. Initially, video email was limited to a select few and was supposed to be the next frontier. But now your four-year-old can send you an email even though he can’t type a word with just a few clicks.
The solution I present to you is not for four-year-olds, but it is easy enough for my eight-year-old niece to send me a video mail every now and then. TokBox.com is not exactly new, but as soon as I discovered this free video messaging service I wanted to go out, jump up in joy and share it with you like a new toy.

How does it work? It uses the webcam and microphone built into your PC/laptop to record a video message and send it as an email to the recipient. Since the recipient could be on a slow connection or his mailbox of a limited size, Tokbox just sends an image grab of the video and a link inviting the recipient to check out the video message. There was no buffering or stopping on the 256 kbps broadband I checked it on and the videos played seamlessly. The interface is clean and simple; in fact, it took my niece just about 15 minutes to master.

The Tokbox site uses the Adobe Flash plug-in, which means you don’t have to install anything on your PC to use the software. To avoid having to go to multiple websites, you can shoot and share the video with your Twitter and Facebook friends directly from the website. You can also login to AOL Messenger, Google Talk, MSN Messenger and Yahoo using the Tokbox instant messenger, giving you a single screen to send and receive video emails. And if you want, you can video blog to Twitter, Facebook or MySpace all from the same page.

TokBox lets you invite your friends to use the site, but this is not necessary for them to watch your message. But they will have to register to send back a video reply. In case your friends are also online on TokBox, you can always do a video call.

TokBox even has some graphic templates in the greetings section that let you overlay your video with graphics to give it a greeting card feel.

On the flip side, the quality of the full-screen video playback is pretty bad. But that is a small price to pay for a brilliant free service like this.

So what are you waiting for, send me a video mail.
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The above article appeared in the Indian Express, on Sunday Jan 10, 2010 (Yes, 01/01/10)

Quickfix Art

The Internet is making it easier for all of us to try our hands at the arts, even create some “masterpieces” without spending an additional penny. This week I look at three websites, one that lets you create your own music without you having to learn anything and two others that help you create beautiful art, without having to pick up a brush.

Tone Matrix
Tone matrix (http://bit.ly/ie-music ) uses a simple Sinewave synthesiser triggered by a 16-step sequencer. Each trigger step causes a tone to be generated using a wave map, the tones in sequence sound like music. To generate music, you start off with a blank canvas which has a 16x16 grid. The click of a mouse turns on the component in the grid and another click turns it off. Click any one and you start hearing a single tone, click the second one and you have two tones. If you move up on the Y axis, you have a higher tone, moving down gives you a scaled down tone. The X axis movement does not change the tonal range, so in case you want two beeps of the same range, you switch on two lights on the X axis. Two lights in the same Y column will produce a chord like affect, which is similar to striking multiple notes at the same time. Trust me, making music on Tone Matrix is addictive. I found it interesting to write the characters of my name and generating music from them.
If you want to take it to the next step, or, as the author of the website says, make the music a lot more spicier, try your hand at the Audio Tool (hobnox.com/audiotool) and play around with beat boxes, baselines, splitters, delays, gates and compressors. Tone Matrix uses a pentatonic scale; don’t get into what it means, but what it will ensure that whatever you generate will sound good. I know this will sound like a toy to some of you, but try it on a day you are down and tired, and it will certainly perk up your energy levels.

Artpad & Strip Generator

Artpad (artpad.art.com) is very similar to Microsoft Paint, but has better brushes, a paint throwing bucket, a tex tool and opacity control.
You can also frame your paintings, and best of all you can playback your actions and see the “master painter” at work. If you think your work is worth sharing, the site allows you to directly send an email to a friend to view your masterpiece. You can also hang your painting in the websites public art gallery.

Strip Generator (stripgenerator.com) on the other hand uses comic set characters and bubbles, to let you make your own comic strip. So if you thought you had brilliant ideas on making a comic strip but couldn’t draw even a smiley, try your hand at the Strip Generator. Do play with the character generator—everyone ‘loved’ the Dracula I created— remember a few dialogues from an old Hindi movie and see your story come to life.
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The above article appeared in the Indian Express, issue dated Sunday 25th October, 2009

Breaking the language barrier - Review Quillpad.com

Since the time I started learning computers, most teachers have stuck to English to reveal the wonders of the PC. As a result, most of us still think in the Queen’s language while using computers, what to speak of typing in local languages. Though some companies have come up with coloured stickers of local language fonts and even charts that tell you which key stands for specific characters, the mix of consonants and syllables in Indian languages makes using them an uphill task. The job is even tougher if you don’t need to type in a local language every day and hence cannot rely on practice to see you through.

This is where Quill Pad (www.quillpad.com) comes to your rescue. Quill Pad was built by Ram Prakash H and K S Sreeram from IIT Madras in September 2006. Three years on, the website supports 10 Indian languages—Hindi, Bangla, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.

Since my words can’t do justice to the ingenuity of the two, I suggest that those of you who can read or write any of the 10 languages try out the website. You can use the Quill Pad editor—which they call my-mother-can-easily-type-interface—without registering. Type the text you want and then copy-paste it to a Word document or e-mail. There is even a mobile interface, similar to the T9 Dictionary, which helps users type in the local language without having to bother about learning the alphabet layout.

Some of my employees who write emails to me in Hindi using the Roman script are happy with this new discovery. They type the way they spell the words in English, and within a jiffy the words reappear in Devnagri script, often correcting their spelling errors. Some Facebook friends with whom I tried a few Quill Pad tricks have started updating their status in local languages.

I encountered a small problem, though. I could not mix two languages—so if you want to compose an English document with a bit of Hindi in it, Quill Pad is not for you. But, then, you can’t ask for the world.

Localisation is the key for the expansion of the Internet. It can no longer afford to limit its content to English. And this is where initiatives like Quill Pad are the key. So, go ahead, type out that letter to your grandmother in your mother tongue.

For trying out or using Quill Pad, click www.quillpad.com

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The above review appeared in the Indian Express, Dated 30th August 2009

Solving a Problem, Online

If a man fell off a plane from an altitude of 10,000 ft, how long will it take for him to hit earth? Well, this is no joke. It is actually a mathematical problem which will take some old fashioned brain slogging to solve.

I have always been in awe of mathematical equations and how using the relevant formula you can explain and solve any problem. However, I am not good at remembering anything but for basic equations from school.

So, the other day, while discussing the rate of evaporation of water for an Olympic size pool with an architect, both of us realised that we had no clue which formula to use, after all this wasn’t one of those problems we were faced with everyday.

Carrying a scientific calculator all the time is not really a practical option. I still do carry one, but not everyone can, and the old scientific ruler is not really available anymore. So how do you get to remember equations, and what happens when you are stuck with a problem.

My immediate thought was to Google the problem, or maybe checkout Wolfram Alpha, the search engine making all the waves. Then I decided to check if Casio—I love their scientific calculators—has put something online, may be a formula search.

And it had. Since June 1, the company has made available its Keisan portal—Keisan means calculation in Japanese—and it was online at www.keisan.casio.com.

The architect and me, both science students, were enamoured by the number of mathematical equations on the site. From the trivial ‘When is Easter for a particular year’ to the serious Bessel functions and probability calculations, they were all there.

The website is accurate up to 50 digit calculations, and users can select how many digits they want in the result. Another great feature is that you can paste both the calculation results and the chart into Excel and incorporate it in your report. So if you are a science student, or just enamoured by mathematical calculations, it is about time you checked out Keisan, 1,50,000 others do so every day.

That’s not all. In July alone, seven new calculations were added to the site, quite an achievement considering serious mathematics is no child’s play. With such interest being generated, Keisan should grow fast and become a useful tool for students and aspiring mathematicians.

By the way, it takes about the 70 seconds for the man to reach earth, Keisan says so.

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The above review appeared in the Indian Express, Dated 26th July 2009.

I suck at Presentations (Read Power Point) Do you ?

Everytime someone told me, I need to make a presentation, I shook, it was stage fright, but as a Business owner, speaker, I have had to make my way around it.. This is something I have always done, get 3 Slides

Slide1: MY Name / Contact Info
Slide2: What am I speaking about (This is constantly on the screen when I am speaking)
Slide3: End, Thank you

Simple, very Zen, but does not work for all situations, situations when someone says, hey, can you email me a presentation.. NAAAA

I have always been a speaker, put me up there and let me speak, I will make sure you know what I mean, and what my story is.. but then.. making sure you have presentation skills is important.

I have been recently reading Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen Blog, and the Video below, from a Talk at Google makes you really see how to make a presentation happen.

So if you, like me, suck at presentations, take out an hour, and see this video.



This event took place on March 21, 2008, as a part of the Authors@Google series.

Make a Quick Buck, Online

Beat the recession by finding some extra income on the Web

Money can’t buy me love, the Beetles once sang. But the times are tough and there is nothing wrong in making some extra dough. This week, I will teach you how to do this without actually having to get a new job or end up doing something on the wrong side of the law. And no, I am not suggesting that you take to multi-level marketing or paid surveys either.

For starters, if you have a digital camera, make a movie, maybe of your dog doing some tricks or your child taking first steps, throw in some animation if you know how to go about it, and upload it on revver.com. They will attach an advertisement to your video and if it becomes popular you can earn up to 50 per cent of the revenue.

Alternatively, upload your videos and pictures to break.com. If they like your work, they will pay you up to $400 for an original video and up to $2,000 for short films. The site also pays up to $50 a picture, if it wins one of their regular contests.

If you are a genius in mathematics, physics or chemistry, or someone who has a diet that actually works, know how to get house things done in the proper manner, or how best to handle a problem child, you can join bitwine.com as an advisor. You will get introduced to people who need advice—you can charge them or become an advisor for free.

If you think there are better ways of reviewing a product or a software, you can start a blog and start ranting at wordpress.com or blogger.com. You can even open an account with payperpost.com and advertise the rate you want for reviewing stuff. You can charge between $5 to $100 a post and some software companies or websites could pay you to review their stuff.

Those of you who can write funny slogans for T-shirts, can set up their own stores at cafepress.com. The website will manufacture and sell the garments for you, and you will make some money without any investment.

Some of us like collecting things. But after a point these only add to the clutter in the house. If you too have old stamps, coins, mugs, collectible lighters etc lying around, open a shop on ebay.in, and start selling. You will not only make good money, but also clean up your house in the process. For instance, I met an old lady who makes puppets and sells them online. If you are also the “crafty kind” then this is one opportunity you can’t afford to miss.

This list is in no way comprehensive, as there are many other sites that let you make money. Just make sure they don’t charge you to sell you a book, or set up an account—in that case they are the ones who are making all the money, not you. So, best of luck with the recession, and if you end up making some money, think of the guy who tipped you off.

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The above article appeared in the Indian Express, on Sunday, 25th January 2009

Come, meet Lonely Girl & Kate Modern: Is this the new Vouyer ?

If you’re tired of TV soaps, check out the interactive action on the Net

I would love to call up Smriti Irani and dig out the real story behind Tulsi, but I don’t have her number, and even if I did, Ekta Kapoor wouldn’t let me discuss it. Rewind to a few years ago when tech geeks were still talking of interactive television and looked forward to the DTH so that we would be able to decide the future and shape the serial as we wanted. But with so many plots changing so often and yet with the characters frozen in time, interactive television would not have helped much.

Then came the Internet and companies like YouTube started beaming videos created and uploaded by people that you could stream and watch. The ones that made most sense were the ones that were humourous, like the Mentos and the Coke videos.

Eventually, Orkut, YouTube and others changed the way one communicated, networked and formed communities—and called it Social Network. Of late, a company called EQAL has been successfully producing two online interactive dramas: Lonely Girl and Kate Modern.

Imagine a high school girl with swooping eyebrows, boy problems, a webcam somewhere in the US with a room filled with stuffed toys. I am not talking of the girl next door or the girl on that X rated credit card hungry website. LG (Lonely Girl is about 496 episodes old having begun in June 2006) is based on the life of a young girl called Bree. There was a time she would stream on YouTube and now it revolves around her friends and family. The series is short and has regular updates of video feeds posted by the fictional character.

Kate Modern is in its 260th episode—it started in July 2007—and is the sister series of the Lonely Girl. The show is set in England, bears many similarities to Lonely Girl, and in its second season, is generating an increasing amount of interest.

Such online dramas show that the Internet TV has arrived. The phenomenon would not have worked without the explosion of broadband and the advent of YouTube. The other reason for its success is the hybrid form of story-telling. What makes it important enough for me to write about it is that, as a viewer, you can correspond with the characters and even alter the plot.

The Internet, or as it’s now called, the Web 2.0, is a relatively new medium for everyone. The way people looked at Internet till a few years ago was how they looked at a newspaper or a radio; the same boring content would be everywhere. So if you miss your action of the daily soaps and the K action on TV is too much for you to bear, head for www.lg15.com, and discover a life beyond TV.

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The Above Article was printed in the Indian Express, on Sunday, May 11, 2008