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The playcast: Of (Google) doodles, car racing and weird voice acting

Krish Raghav and Sidin Vadukut — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:47:00 GMT

Welcome to another edition of the Playcast. This week, we have two interviews, a literal blast from our video game past and yet another edition of Beautiful Tweeple.

To start off with, we have an interview with Dennis Hwang, who does all those clever little google doodles on the Google home page. Krish caught up with Hwang while he was in Delhi to announce the winners of the India leg of “Doodle for Google”, an international competition for schoolchildren to design an iteration of the Google logo. They talk about the origin, process and sometimes-problematic nature of the Google doodles.

Our next segment is a little excerpt from a collection of the 50 worst video game voice overs courtsey the website www.audioatrocities.com

We then move on quickly… from game voice acting to game designing. Krish chats with Rajesh Rao of Dhruva Interactive – a game studio that has worked on racing games like Need for Speed, Project Gotham Racing and Pure. Rajesh tells us more about the differences in various kinds of racing games, and developments in the racing game genre.

And of course we end with Sidin taking the floor for yet another edition of Beautiful Tweeple…

Enjoy!

The Playcast: A digital brand index, the Nokia Forum and more tweeple

Krish Raghav and Sidin Vadukut — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:35:00 GMT

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On this weeks playcast, we have a couple of interesting interviews and two new segments lined up for you on the show.

To start with, Sidin Vadukut deconstructs the Brandtology digital brand index with the help of Bob Grove, Asia Pacific Director of Technology,Edelman - the people behind the index.

we introduce a brand new section specially designed to help you avoid work

The head of Forum Nokia Purnima Kochikar tells us about the Nokia development Community in India

and Sidin Vadukut returns with a brand new edition of beautiful tweeple

Online video will be the next killer app

Sidin Vadukut — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:34:00 GMT

New Delhi: Cisco Systems Inc. recently announced a slew of online services to enable businesses to communicate and collaborate. Earlier this week Mint spoke exclusively to Padmasree Warrior, chief technology officer (CTO) of Cisco Systems, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum’s India Economic Summit 2009. Warrior spoke about WEF, Cisco’s strategic shift, the next phase of the Internet and some key drivers of future technology. Edited excerpts:

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When you attend an event like the India Economic Summit, what excites the technologist in you?

To me what I find most interesting in these sessions are the difference of opinions and diverse viewpoints. I think they get a good collection of people to talk about various topics. What I find most useful is the data driven approach. Some of the data lights up a bulb: How big is an issue? What impact can it have?

For instance, Cisco is working on innovations in education; how to use TelePresence in schools. When you sit through a session on education, I am immediately thinking of using this data for that research.

Web of networks: Cisco’s chief technology officer Padmasree Warrior says collaboration will drive the next wave of increase in productivity. Rajkumar / Mint

Cisco seems to have had a dramatic swing in strategy over the last few years. It is no longer the company it was, for instance, in 2001 when it was all about networking equipment. Now you have the Flip video recorder and PostPath acquisitions, and now talk of acquiring Tandberg.

Cisco has a track record of constantly reinventing itself. We’ve done this before. For example, we did this when we moved in VoIP (voice over internet protocol) technology a few years ago.

Where we see ourselves right now is preparing for the next five years, for what we call the next phase of the Internet. Where video, collaboration and virtualization will be big application and revenue drivers, and the network will continue to play an enabling role. So all of the acquisitions we have announced, and the companies we are looking to acquire, are to help us fill gaps in this plan we have. So that we are positioned for this transition.

But is there a strategic shift away from products to services? Or is this a broadening of portfolio?

It is a broadening of portfolio. And we are not moving away from products. Instead, we see us extending our existing leadership in products into systems, solutions, architectures and platforms. More and more customers want us to provide both a technology architecture and a business architecture. So we are looking at our current portfolio and how we can deliver on this broader expectation.

Cisco seems to be focusing strongly on this concept of enterprise collaboration. It is a term that comes up often on your website…

We feel that collaboration will drive the next wave of increase in productivity. The Web was first used for a lot of transactions and interactions. You had messaging and other text-based communication. In Web 2.0, there were social networks and consumer-level interaction and collaboration.

We are thinking of how we can bring these things into the enterprise world. Especially video as a foundation for collaboration. Through this, we think we can increase the productivity in companies and countries by 5-10%. In fact, we just announced a whole series of enterprise collaboration products yesterday.

The products you have announced go beyond video. It also includes email and voice. Email is a new area for Cisco.

We want to build a platform that brings together video, voice, data and then bring in Web 2.0 concepts. But with policy and security measures so that companies can use them. And then set a platform for the future where I think the focus will be on inter-company collaboration.

Now look at Twitter, for instance. It allows anyone from anywhere to connect with other people who share the same interests. This is a very good thing to have within a company. We need to build a system that enables this.

During your tenure at Motorola and Freescale Semiconductor, you coined the term “seamless mobility”. Do you see that idea coming to fruition at Cisco?

In fact, many companies are making this vision a reality; including Apple for consumers with the iPhone. When I was thinking of the term, I meant it as users having the ability to access applications, video, music and data on any device, anywhere.

Take the case of the Flip, which is made by Pure Digital, a company we acquired a few months ago. Now with the Flip, you can shoot HD (high definition) video, plug it into a USB port and share it with anyone immediately. That is what I call seamless mobility. So yes, I see Cisco being one of the companies central to making seamless mobility a reality.

You were one of two ethnic Indians short-listed by the Obama administration for the position of chief technology officer for the US. Vivek Kundra went on to become CTO. When do you think the government of India will begin to take technology and information that seriously?

Governments all over the world are beginning to take this seriously. I recently read in a report, don’t recall which one, that a 10% increase in broadband penetration can increase GDP (gross domestic product) growth by 1.3%. So I think IT, especially broadband, are key economic growth drivers. And so they need leadership positions in the government, whatever is the title or designation of these leaders, to lead this.

And during the summit, we’ve heard many people talk about the importance of IT in health, education and other areas.

Governments are taking this very seriously now, including the India government.

As a technologist, you stand on the cutting edge. So what is next? What are the next big technology ideas?

In the next phase of the internet, like music before, we think video will be the next killer app. We are looking at what this means for all our products? How can we make online video a great experience?

Second area is collaboration. The Internet must help companies to interact with people inside and outside its boundaries.

The third pillar is virtualization leading to cloud computing. This is the notion that we can separate applications and services from the underlying hardware and deliver them on demand.

And lastly, sustainability. In Cisco we are working on an initiative called Smart Connected Communities where we use networks to make buildings smarter and energy efficiently. So not just hardware and data centres that operate cleanly, but also using ICT to make homes and offices efficient.

With all these innovations, do you see events such as WEF becoming redundant? With live video and TelePresence, people don’t have to assemble at all. Soon will we be able sit at home or in office and attend a WEF?

Actually that is not that far away. I use TelePresence a lot. Recently we used it to connect 19,000 people across Cisco for a sales conference.

The key thing is it saves a lot of money. It is also good for the environment and prevents fatigue for participants. We are also extending the technology into healthcare where doctors can use the system to deliver virtual consultation.

So how many years away are we from a virtual World Economic Forum?

If we had our way, an year or so! But in some cases you really do need to meet and talk.

The playcast: A new Orkut, Android netbooks and beautiful tweeple

Krish Raghav and Sidin Vadukut — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:51:00 GMT

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This weeks show of the playcast comes in three segments. In the first part of the show we speak to Google about the social networking sites redesign.

Orkut has become India’s OTHER social network, the one that’s not been in the news for a while now. It’s India’s most populous social networking site, home to 13 million accounts and double the number of communities and groups.

The new redesign makes the now-aging site sport a more Facebook-like look.

In moving to the GWT platform, the same that powers the futuristic google Wave, Orkut now supports much more dynamic content - video chats for instance. We spoke to Rahul Kulkarni from Google for more info.

In segment two, we move from one Google product to another: Android has been the center of much fanfare the last few months, but the HTC Hero and Samsung Galaxy aside - Android devices themselves have arrived in India in only a slow trickle. laptop maker Acer are latest to join that limited-invite party - but not with a Phone, but a Laptop. The Aspire One dual boots Windows XP (a name we wont be hearing much longer) and a modified variant of Android. We squawk in befuddlement and Ask Why. Acer’s CMO S. Rajendran answers. We also speak about the netbook market in India, and why netbooks aren;’t really netbooks in this part of the world.

And in segment three, Sidin Vadukut talks to you about Beautiful Tweeple. This is best listened to, so we refuse to explain any further

Deepwish - Charity through Twitter this diwali

Ayeshea Perera — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:29:00 GMT

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Deepwish was a Twitter Initiative started by Anaggh Desai which sought to raise funds charity this Diwali.

Desai and a cross section of tweeple made a commitment to contribute money to the charity Goonj for every diwali wish that contained the hashtag #deepwish

The initiative quickly gathered ground on Twitter and organisers were able to make Rs55,000 in just 36 hours. On the show we talk to Desai about what brought about this initiative and the potential impact of social media on fundraising in India.

Deepwish - Charity through Twitter this diwali

Ayeshea Perera — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:29:00 GMT

download audio link

Deepwish was a Twitter Initiative started by Anaggh Desai which sought to raise funds charity this Diwali.

Desai and a cross section of tweeple made a commitment to contribute money to the charity Goonj for every diwali wish that contained the hashtag #deepwish

Pollux: organizing your music gets easy

Krish Raghav — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:40:00 GMT

It’s the perpetual bane of having a large music library.

Something somewhere, buried within a labyrinth of subfolders, is called just ‘Track 1’ and you can’t for the life of you figure out what its supposed to be.

Download link here

Enter Pollux. It’s a nifty tool that clings to your iTunes (its currently mac only, but expect a PC port soonish) and automates the process of identifying your songs. It’ll get lyrics, artist info, and album art turning your legions of Track 1s into a neat, organized library.

How does it do this? Through clever use of third-party libraries - MusicBrainz, an open source music library, and Music DNS, which uses an acoustic ‘fingerprint’ technology to identify any (English/European) song you throw at it.

We spoke to Chetan Surpur and Shashwat Kandadai, the developers of Pollux, on the challenges of automatic music organization, the huge response to Pollux, and why Bollywood still doesn’t have a home on the Internet.

Parsis go online to stay in touch with their shrinking community

Phil Hazlewood / AFP — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:30:00 GMT

Mumbai: India’s Parsis, the modern-day descendants of migrants who fled persecution in Iran at least 1,000 years ago, are turning to new technology to keep their ancient Zoroastrian religion alive.

The Zoroastrian way: A Parsi woman at a fire temple on Parsi New Year, Navroze, in Mumbai on 19 August. Blogs, directories and matchmaking sites are helping Parsis stay connected with their 3,500-year-old faith. Indranil Mukherjee / AFP.

Websites, blogs, online directories and matchmaking portals are being used by the close-knit but scattered and shrinking community to stay in touch and true to the 3,500-year-old faith.

“The Parsis are a community without borders. We’re almost all over the world,” said Yazdi Tantra, who runs a computer consultancy firm in Mumbai, where 70% of the world’s Parsis live.

“We have this technology so that we can keep in contact because our numbers are very small. If there was no technology, we wouldn’t communicate with one another... It keeps the community together,” he added.

Tantra runs several websites, including the www.zoroastrians.net portal, which includes everything from suggestions for Parsi baby names to traditional Parsi food, adding to a global network of sites on the community and religion.

What started out as being “just for fun” and a way to catalogue Parsi contacts for his own use three years ago unearthed an enthusiastic online community in India and across the world, he said.

“Our website does a lot of connecting people,” he added.

Such connections are more important than ever as the largely prosperous, urbanized minority that produced the likes of Indian industrialist Ratan Tata, conductor Zubin Mehta and Queen singer Freddie Mercury gets smaller every year.

The editor of Parsiana magazine, Jehangir Patel, told AFP that there were now only about 90,000 Parsis around the world “at most”, as a low birth rate, marriage outside the community and emigration takes its toll.

In India, the last national census in 2001 recorded just under 70,000 Parsis—Zoroastrians who follow the prophet Zarathustra and worship one god, the creator of the universe, Ahura Mazda.

They believe that good thoughts, good words and good deeds will triumph over evil and chaos, and the ancient religion is said to have influenced Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

But demographers predict that there could be as few as 32,000 Parsis left by 2051, based on studies of fertility rates.

In Mumbai, the influential Bombay Parsi Punchayat governing council is looking to young people to save the community by launching what has been called a “Facebook for Parsis” website and a youth wing.

“Interaction among youngsters will be encouraged so that they find partners through the social events and networking sites, and eventually marry within the community,” trustee Khojestee Mistry told the Hindustan Times recently.

Zpeakerbox, an online youth magazine for the Zoroastrian community, and the social networking site www.ushtatebook.com already exist.

Elsewhere, Tantra’s Theparsidirectory.com and the Parsi Yellow Pages on the Parsiana website aim to log as many Parsis as possible plus listings for everything from Parsi accountants to Parsi yoga institutes. “As a minority, we tend to stick together,” said Patel. “Almost 33% marry out of the community, so we’re getting a situation about how long people will see themselves as Parsis and how long we exist as a community.”

A debate is raging about whether Parsi women who marry non-Parsis should still be considered part of the community. Traditionalists say they shouldn’t while reformists say they should if the community is to survive.

“We are always under a cloud. That reflects the need for organizations and associations in the community... It’s a way of sticking together,” Patel added.

Mumbai architect Arzan Sam Wadia runs Parsikhabar.net, one of a number of blogs on Parsi matters. Half of his readers are from outside India, he told AFP from his base in New York.

Online news portals give an immediacy to community news and allow for a range of views that cannot be duplicated by existing print publications, he added.

“Within Bombay (Mumbai) and outside, just the fact that people are spread out so far and wide geographically, there’s no mainstream publication in the traditional sense that can really do justice to it,” he said.

Journalist Shernaaz Engineer said her blog, Parsi-link.blogspot.com, and others like it were the latest sign of how one of the world’s oldest living faiths was adapting, she told AFP.

It was also a way of avoiding the “factionalism” that has crept into the Parsi media over issues such as marriage outside the community, she said.

Livemint’s guide to Twitter dos and don’ts

Saabira Chaudhuri — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:24:00 GMT

Shashi Tharoor’s recent Tweet about traveling “cattle class” has spiraled way out of control, inciting a veritable storm of responses both online and offline. Manmohan Singh dubbed the minister’s remark a “joke,” but later asked him to show more discretion; and Rajasthan’s Chief Minister, Ashok Gehlot, and Union Rural Development Minister CP Joshi, have demanded Tharoor’s resignation.

While Twitter has proved troublesome for prominent public figures in the past – think JR Smith, the American basketball player who was recently in the news for his allegedly gang-related tweets, and British MP Sion Simon, who ruffled feathers by jokingly tweeting about Britian’s Got Talent singing sensation Susan Boyle causing swine flu – this is the first time an Indian politician has been the center of a controversy involving the social media site.

Bottom line: watch what you say online because word travels fast. Although Twitter is relatively new to India, it is rapidly racking up users: according to Alexa, India is the world’s third highest user of Twitter, and the site is already the 13th most popular in India.

If you’d like to build your online following, keep your tweet feed content interesting, engage fellow tweeters or just avoid stirring up a hornet’s nest, read on. We’ve complied advice from prominent tweeters to pull together a basic guide to best practices for using Twitter. Whether you’re a politician, brand, celebrity or just a regular tweeter trying to make some connections, here are a few pointers to keep in mind.

Manage Your Identity

“It’s good to explicitly show who is tweeting for a brand. Like when Scott Monty responds on Ford’s Twitter account, it adds a human face to the brand.” (Gaurav Mishra.)

“Don’t use long handles as it eats into your character limit and makes it hard for people to remember when they need to connect with you.” (Gaurav Sikka)

“For brands, it is important to live the brand perspective. For example, whoever was tweeting as @thebluefrog sometime back had started tweeting as himself rather than as the brand, stating opinions, making recommendations -- which is not something that a music venue would do.” (Shirley D’Costa)

Think About Your Content

“If you’re a brand, avoid being preachy — show, don’t tell. Let the consumer make choices about your values.” (Gaurav Sikka)

“Twittering 30-plus times an hour pushes other people’s messages off followers’ homepages, and sends mobiles into convulsive twit-fits... If you have a lot to say, but still want to engage with followers without alienating them, consider making more liberal use of DMs.” (Margaret Mason)

“Advertisers should tweet regularly about the thought process behind new strategies, provide rough cuts for new advertising campaigns and direct users to your blog for larger discussions and consumer feedback.” (Gaurav Sikka)

Monitor Your Interaction

“Twitter is about making connections and having two-way conversations. If you’re always going ‘I, Me, My this, My that...’ forget about getting too many followers. Give feedback and endorse work of your peers just as you would expect them to do for you.” (Gaurav Sikka)

“Brands should interact with their customers regularly, run promotions and contests to keep customers engaged, dedicate one person to handle the account totally, set up searches with their keywords and when someone tweets with those keywords reply to them.” (Hrish Thota)

“Don’t autorespond a general message to your new followers.” (Twanna Hines)

“It’s better to direct message someone if you’re making 1:1 plans or having a very focused, personal conversation.” (Chris Brogan)

“A basic starting point for businesses is to use TweetDeck and CoTweet to monitor and respond to customers.” (Gaurav Mishra)

“Participate in offline tweetups and other initiatives to grow your network and make real connections with people.” (Gaurav Sikka)

“If you would like to un-follow someone, it’s always a good practice to tweet indicating why you are un-following one or a bunch of people -- either be specific or keep it generic, based on the level of interaction you have had with them and the seriousness of the reason you un-following.” (Nikhil Nulkar)

“Interact with people and be responsive to their replies - both good and bad. Ignoring bad comments or criticism about your brand is not going to make it go away.” (Vaijayanthi)

Tweet Responsibly

“Always credit information that you are retransmitting by R/T @user or via @user.” (Gaurav Sikka)

“People who are celebrities, and can possibly be emulated should be diplomatic without losing the essence of one’s opinions.” (Gul Panag)

“Don’t ever tweet sensitive office information, act like the official spokeperson of the company, or abuse someone who may have a different opinion.” (Hrish Thota)

“If you’re a celebrity, don’t use Twitter as a platform to solely promote your body of work, rant about catfights, malign anybody, feed your narcissism. And of course, interacting/ responding to tweets is fab.” (Shirley D’Costa)

“Topics related to religion, politics, etc (basically the ones that are controversial) should be dealt with using utmost care and preferably avoided.” (Nikhil Nulkar)

New blood tests ‘to detect gastrointestinal cancers’

PTI — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 05:05:00 GMT

London: Scientists have developed two new blood tests which they claim will make detection of gastrointe -stinal cancers simpler, cost-effective and more acceptable to patients than the existing methods.

In the first research, a team led by Joost Louwagie of Beligium-based OncoMethylome Sciences collected blood samples before surgery from 193 patients having colorectal cancer, and from 688 controls undergoing colonoscopy for cancer screening.

DNA was extracted from the blood plasma and tested for the presence of DNA methylation — that’s linked to initiation and progression of tumours — of specific genes.

The scientists then evaluated the best-performing methylated genes in blood samples, with the ultimate goal of providing a sensitive, specific and patient-friendly option for colorectal cancer screening.

“This test has potential to provide a better balance of performance, cost-effectiveness and patient compliance than options currently available for colorectal cancer screening.

“We optimised the methods of DNA extraction and methylation detection so that we could detect low levels of methylated genes in people with colorectal cancer, and we were able to find a high frequency of two newly methylation genes, SYNE1 and FOXE1, in colorectal cancer patients.

“The same methylation genes occurred infrequently in non-cancerous individuals,” Louwagie said.

Team member and CSIRO Exploration & Mining scientist Rob Hough said the search for the meteorite was helped by the fact the Nullarbor Plain is marked by white limestone rocks.

“So a dark meteorite on the white surface is easier to find, however it’s very tiny, so the discovery is still really quite amazing. This particular meteorite is very interesting because of its rarity. It is an achondrite — a basalt — with a composition that suggest an asteroid from the inner asteroid belt,” Hough said.

According to the astronomers, the all sky cam network had been an extremely successful project and had spotted many fireballs.

“The Plain is very difficult place to have technology like the cameras and the fieldwork to find the meteorite is not trivial. The logistics are a really important aspect of a project like this and it takes a lot of planning to make it work,” he said.

Playcast: The challenges of getting India to give

Krish Raghav — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 05:14:00 GMT

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The India Giving Challenge is an online fundraising competition which offers corporates and NGOs the opportunity to participate in the Joy of Giving Week, a social movement that aims to engage Indians in ”giving back” to society. The Joy of Giving Week will take place from September 27 – October 3, 2009, while the Challenge began on September 1 and will continue till October 10.

The challenge encourages corporate and NGOs to raise funds online by reaching out to their employees, customers, partners and supporters who in turn will reach out to their friends and families thus creating a community approach to fundraising.

In this podcast, we speak to Dhaval Udani of GiveIndia.com to find out more details about this initiative, the challenges that lie behind organising an event of this nature and how the culture of giving and fund raising has evolved in India.

Visit the India giving challenge website

Guinness gamer still revved up after 40 hours of GTA IV

Sidin Vadukut — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 10:12:00 GMT

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Mumbaikar Chirantan Patnaik recently broke the world record for ‘The longest time spent playing GTA IV’, demolishing the previous record of 28 hours which was held by Jim Patten of the USA. Patnaik played the game for a solid 40 hours and 20 minutes, and in this candid interview with Sidin Vadukut, insists that he could have easily gone on for at least another ten, if only his witnesses had not started to doze off.

The interview also looks at how Patnaik prepared for his rather unique world record, how it went, and how life has been in the aftermath.

Tweeting for a cause

Saabira Chaudhuri — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 08:11:00 GMT

Twestival – and no that’s not a typo – this year, takes place from 10-13 September in cities around the world.

If you’re wondering what a Twestival is, the name should offer up a clue: it’s a Twitter festival. People around the world connect online and then meet up offline to raise money or awareness for a cause.

This isn’t the first time Twitter has been used to raise money for charity. Last year, social media consultant Beth Kanter, raised over $2500 in just 90 minutes by challenging highly connected geeks to tap into their extensive Twitter networks. Her attempt started with a mass tweet from the Seattle Gnomedex 8.0 Conference, where she asking people to help her “send Leng Sopharath, a young Cambodian woman, off to her junior year of college in good health.” Tweets and retweets traveled through the online community, and by the end of the conference, Kanter had collected almost $4000.

Earlier this year, Ashton Kutcher pledged to donate $100,000 to the Malaria No More Fund if he could attract one million viewers live on Twitter. He did, and the Africans sleeping peacefully under mosquito nets have the social media service to thank.

The Twestival concept originated in September last year, when a group of London Twitter users decided to hosted a event called the Harvest Twestival – entirely sponsored by Twitter users (the cool kids or the real nerds, depending on how you look at it, call them tweeters). They raised money and canned food for a London based nonprofit called The Connection.

Earlier this year, in February, another Twestival took place, this time on a global scale. The event brought Twitter communities together to raise a staggering $250,000 for charity:water, a nonprofit organization that works towards bringing clean water to the developing world.

Next month’s festival is taking a more grassroots approach, asking cities around the world to host events in support a local (rather than a global) cause on one day during the weekend of 10-13 September 2009.

Tweeters from five Indian cities are on board: Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai and New Delhi, however only those from Bangalore and Mumbai have currently zeroed in on a cause. Bangalore is supporting local charity Dream a Dream, which works with disadvantaged children, while Mumbai is raising funds for Help a Child, which provides financial aid to help children who can’t afford an education.

According to Vaijayanthi KM -- the regional Twestival Local coordinator across India, Bangladesh and the Middle East -- Pune and Kolkata are likely to participate as well.

Hrish Thota, a software professional who has over 1,500 followers on Twitter, is leading the charge for Bangalore. He wants to organize an evening out for the children supported by local charity Dream a Dream. Thota also co-organized the February Twestival in Bangalore to raise money for charity: water, but admits that he was only able to raise Rs. 5000 as his efforts were very last minute.

“This time we are planning to have an event in such a way that people feel involved with the cause. Last time we had an event people just didn’t feel connected with the cause,” he explains. “We want to organize a fun evening with the children using Twestival volunteers. We’ll raise money to pay for the evening but more than raising money, our aim is to get people involved with the cause.”

Thota, and Bangalore Twestival’s other volunteers, decided to adopt Dream a Dream as their charity of choice because the organization is visibly active around the city, and according to Thota has really made its mark. “We have seen them being very active in helping out underprivileged children around Bangalore by fundraising through marathon and cycling expeditions, and by getting people to pledge money,” he says. Their goals are modest – they are attempting to reach out to about 40 Twitter and 10 or 20 non-Twitter users.

Mumbai’s event is being spearheaded by Monik Pamecha, a blogger who is just 13 years old and who already has 16,499 followers on Twitter. Pamecha explains that all the Mumbai Twestival’s volunteers were found on Twitter, and that they will use the tool to publicize an event they plan to hold to support Help a Child.

Although it’s too soon to tell how next month’s Twestival will play out in India, charities should watch the event carefully. While raising money through Twitter may increasingly be becoming de rigueur in New York and London, the big question is whether it will appeal Indian tweeters in the same fashion.

Vaijayanthi seems confident that as India’s Twitter based grows, raising money through the medium will also become easier. “Twitter is a new medium in India but is slowly gaining mass adoption. We are definitely in a much better position compared to 6 months ago,” she says.

She admits that Twestival organizers do have major obstacles to surmount: “Somebody might identify with our cause, but just because they aren’t on Twitter and think they don’t belong to that sort of gang they may not participate.” However, she goes on to stress that even if someone is a non-tweeter, ultimately the goal is to raise funds and awareness about an issue: “Twitter is just another platform or a tool – the idea goes well beyond.”

For more articles on non profits, development and social responsibility, go to the Development Dossier

Scientists create ‘glow in the dark’ red blood cells

PTI — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 07:26:00 GMT

Washington: Scientists have turned human stem cells into “glow in the dark” red blood cells, which they claim will soon help them to create mature, transfusable, life-saving blood.

An international team, led by Monash University, has modified a human embryonic stem cell line to glow red when the stem cells become red blood cells, the latest edition of the ‘Nature Methods´ journal reported.

According to the scientists, they are now a step closer to making fully functional red blood cells from human embryonic stem cells.

While human embryonic stem cells (HESCs) have the potential to turn into any cell type in the body, it remains a scientific challenge to reliably turn these stem cells into specific cell types such as red blood cells.

According to the scientists, the development of the ErythRED embryonic stem cell line, which fluoresces red when haemoglobin genes are switched on, is an important development that will help optimise conditions which generate these cells.

"Not only will the ErythRED cell line lead to more efficient creation of red blood cells from human embryonic stem cells, but these cells are a crucial tool for monitoring the behaviour of the cells when transplanted into animal models,” lead scientist professor Andrew Elefanty said.

Added team member professor Joe Sambrook: “The elegant work of the group unlocks the entrance to the long sought and elusive differentiation pathway that leads to expression of adult haemoglobin genes.”

The research was supported by the Australian Stem Cell Centre, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and National Health and Medical Research Foundation.

Online social networking may decide your employment prospects

PTI — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 10:02:00 GMT

New York: Your social networking activities online -- whether you tweet a few lines or scribble on the Facebook wall -- could well decide your job prospects, as more number of American employers are turning to such sites before zeroing in on the right candidate for employment.

A major chunk of the US employers are banking on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace, to research on a candidate before recruitment, says a survey.

Nearly half of employers surveyed in the US by job portal CareerBuilder showed that 45% of them use social networking sites to research job candidates. Last year, the same stood at just 22%.

About 11% are planning to start using social networking sites for screening.

Moreover, about 35% of employers reported that they have found content on social networking sites that made them decide not to hire the candidate.

The survey was conducted online within the US by Harris Interactive on behalf of CareerBuilder.com between 22 May and 10 June 2009 among 2,667 hiring managers and human resource professionals.

Going by the findings, Facebook is the most preferred among employers with 29% of the employers using that site for online searches or background checks before recruiting candidates.

Besides, 26% of respondents use LinkedIn, 21% surf MySpace, 11% search blogs and 7% follow candidates on Twitter for information.

The industries most likely to screen job seekers via such sites or search engines include IT (63%) and professional and business services (53%).

“Social networking is a great way to make connections with potential job opportunities and promote your personal brand across the Internet,” CareerBuilder vice-president of human resources Rosemary Haefner said.

Among surveyed, 53% respondents said candidates have posted provocative or inappropriate photographs or information, while 44% said that many candidates have posted information about drinking or using drugs.

As per the survey, 35% of respondents found that candidates bad-mouthed their previous employer, co-workers or clients and made them decide not to hire such people.

Interestingly, 14% of employers did not hire a candidate because he/she send a message using an emoticon such as a smiley face while 16% decided against recruiting a candidate for using text language such as ‘GR8´ (great) in an e-mail or job application.

On the other hand, nearly 18% said they found content on such sites that helped them hire a candidate.

Podcast: “India no.3 in world list of identity theft and phishing”

Krish Raghav — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 05:27:00 GMT

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Today we talk about the issue of Internet security and specifically about Identity theft on the Internet. How do you know a website is what it claims to be and how do you trust a website with your personal information? Is there a way to differentiate an original site from one that hosts malicious content?

To answer these questions, we talk to Gautam Jayaraman of Uniken, who is building a national identity repository from India and developing a tool to help users identify original from fraudulent websites.

How did hackers crash Twitter?

Samanth Subramanian — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 09:21:00 GMT

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Last week, millions of people around the world experience severed attacks of panic as Twitter blacked out for hours.

It even seemed, for a while, that Facebook would be next, and that the end of civilization was well nigh.

Everything turned out all right, of course, and we were told that Twitter had simply experienced a denial of service attack.

But exactly happens during such an attack, and how does it bring down a web site? To talk about this subject, we have on the show S. Maheswaran, national manager for strategic accounts at Websense, which specializes in web security gateway software.

Want to map your hometown? Throw a party

Poornima Mohandas — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:53:00 GMT

Bangalore: Two months back, when D. Alagesa Pandian decided he wanted to map his hometown, Hosur, some 40km from Bangalore, he started organizing a party around it. Pandian sent a party invite on the OpenStreetMap mailing network and six people turned up.

Mapping network: OpenStreetMap member B.V. Pradeep says he maps for fun and because he wants to contribute towards society. Hemant Mishra / Mint

The group that got together at 8am at the Hosur bus stand some days later was part of the OpenStreetMap network, which aims to map the world.

The group split into three and biked their way through the congested town armed with global positioning systems (GPS), pen and paper. They helped put faces to email addresses and even introduced two Hosur localities into the movement.

“What is important is mapping the skeleton of the city like the arterial roads, major landmarks, temples and shopping areas,” says Pandian, who treated the bunch to a sumptuous meal prepared by his wife at his house in Hosur.

After an afternoon siesta, the bunch set out again, this time on foot, to map Manjusree Nagar, where Pandian resides. That over, they collated all the gathered data and uploaded it on to the digital world.

“I made a couple of friends that day,” says the 34-year-old Pandian, a doctor of botany who had joined the mapping network just a month earlier. “I hope to meet them and some new people at the next party in August.”

Steve Coast, a software entrepreneur currently based in San Francisco, founded OpenStreetMap, or OSM, in the UK in April 2006 to create free, digital maps. The not-for-profit foundation uses the crowdsourcing model, on the lines of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, urging global communities to translate satellite images into roads dotted with bus stops, offices and footpaths. It has 130,000 registered users globally.

There are no formal editors for OSM but at least 2% of the users act as reviewers, says Arun Ganesh, 21, an engineering graduate who aggressively mapped parts of Chennai in three-four months on to OSM. “As (the) number of users grow, number of edits also go up and increase veracity.”

India boasts of hundreds of users today, with active mappers spread across Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata and even Ludhiana. Just a year-and-a-half earlier, there was nil activity on OSM from India.

Culturally, Indians don’t have a habit of using maps but this is slowly changing, especially among the younger people in technology companies.

“Whenever there is some planning involved, I see people using maps but not when they are stuck in a traffic jam,” says Pandian of his friends and peers. Pandian himself runs a technology company, Bangalore-based Mapunity Information Services Pvt. Ltd.

Indian mappers, mostly male and tech-savvy, are also catching up with mapping parties, a concept popular in Germany and the UK.

These are free, open-to-all events such as the one in Hosur, where people get together with global positioning devices to map streets, by-lanes, government buildings, parks and the like, laced with food, drinks and merry-making.

On 1 August, Kolkata had a mapping party in Jadavpur, a residential locality and home to an eponymous university in the south of the city.

Bangalore, which has played host to a couple of mapping parties in recent months, will have two more in August—on 9 August in Electronic City, an eastern suburb chock-a-block with technology companies, and another in the latter half of the month in Koramangala, a favourite residential address among tech workers.

Members say they have seen OSM swell in India thanks to free map workshops, increasing awareness and the falling price of GPS-enabled cellphones, an essential tool for map making.

These high-end phones, which can locate the longitude and latitude of the user, used to cost as much as Rs20,000 in 2007. That price tag’s down by half now.

Pretty much every country on the globe has someone active in OSM, says San Francisco-based Mikel Maron, board member of OpenStreetMap Foundation. “It’s always surprising to find out someone from the other side of the globe working passionately on the same project you are.”

Amit Prasad, founder, managing director and chief executive of SatNav Technologies Pvt. Ltd, a Hyderabad-based firm specialized in GPS maps and navigation, sees great value in such free-to-use crowdsourcing initiatives.

“The very big advantage is the high level of localized knowledge. You know the things around your house like nobody else.” Moreover, says Prasad, “these maps are free to use and not the proprietary data of (say) Google.”

He was referring to Google Inc.’s Map Maker service, launched in August in India to tap into community knowledge to enhance Google Maps. Though large parts of it are contributed by the community, Google’s map data is the intellectual property of Google, while OSM operates under a creative commons licence, allowing for freer copyrights.

The extent of localization and cultural aspects is much more in OSM than in Google Maps, says T.B. Dinesh, 48, who plans to track shepherd trails across Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra in the coming months, and mark the route on OSM.

His company, where he is a technical director, is looking to document the nomadic paths as part of a research project.

That apart, unlike the many road maps available today, OSM indicates walking paths, cycle trails, trekking trails and skiing routes, says B.V. Pradeep, 30, who maps almost thrice a week.

Standing in Bangalore’s lung, Cubbon Park, he says, “For instance, if one were to map this park in a regular map, one would just mark the main roads through it. But OSM maps aim to indicate walking paths as well.”

Last week Pradeep, also a cycling enthusiast, biked through Sarjapur, a suburb in eastern Bangalore with a fast-changing skyline of multi-storeyed, residential apartments, marking the latitude and longitude coordinates of the most permanent landmarks in descending order—government buildings, followed by schools, places of worship, apartment blocks and, finally, malls.

“I map for fun and because I want to contribute towards society,” says Pradeep, an electronics engineer with Mapunity Information Services. He is one of the local contacts for OSM in India.

Others hope to build and monetize. Subhodip Biswas, 23, a computer science engineer and another contact for OSM in India, is working on the code to build an OSM-based application for micro-blogging site Twitter.

“The application will indicate the latitude and longitude of the person who tweets,” says Biswas, who evangelizes the cause at engineering colleges.

The easiest way to blog, ever

Sidin Vadukut — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 17:03:00 GMT

New Delhi: Posterous is an ingenuous little online service that let’s you create a fairly sophisticated blog just via email. Once you set up your account on Posterous, you can upload blog posts by just composing them in your email client. The title becomes the subject and the body the text of your post.

Click here to watch video

2a07055e-7831-11de-9851-000b5dabf636.flvEmail it to a Posterous email address and within seconds... your post is up and ready for the public.

But that’s not all. Posterous does ingenuous things with links, videos, images and audio files. Attach an audio file with the post and Posterous automatically embeds it in a little player. Same goes for audios. Embed documents and the system automatically embeds that too.

And now Posterous also accepts links from Google Maps and converts them into embedded, interactive maps in your posts.

With frequent new additions to the Posterous service it could easily replace your existing blogging platform. Especially with the cross-posting facility. (Posterous can simultaneously post your entries to Wordpress, Twitter and a host of other services.)

See the video above for a demo of a full media post via Posterous.

Why the delay in 3G for India?

Samanth Subramanian — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 19:45:00 GMT

On Just to Clarify, we’ve received some emails over the past couple of months, asking for clarifications on the subject 3G telephony, so we’ve decided to produce an episode devoted to the subject.

Download the show here

So what exactly is 3G? How is it faster or better than the mobile telephony we have today? And what was controversial about the process of auctioning the 3G spectrum in the final days of the previous government?

To answer these questions, our guest on Just to Clarify is Mahesh Uppal,director at Com First, a communications consultancy specializing in telecom.

As always, if you want anything explained on Just to Clarify, please do write in at samanth.s@livemint.com.