Aggregate All Your Data In Real Time

I love RSS, I love IM and I love the concept of Attention Data. Wrap it all up together and put a just-in-time bow on top and what do you get? The Touchstone Attention Management Engine. I love it.

A product of Australia’s Faraday Media, founded by Chris Saad and Ashley Angell, Touchstone is currently in private alpha with a few hundred invites going out per month. There’s a new batch available now, but note that it’s for Windows only.

The company is announcing today a first round of funding and though it’s declined to provide any details on that funding Saad tells me it will mean a major ramping up of development. To be honest I was skeptical until he and I chatted about just what Touchstone does. Even prior to hearing about the funding, I’d visited the site months ago and left with no idea what was going on. I’m real glad I figured it out, because Touchstone is the coolest thing I’ve seen in quite awhile.

Here’s what it is: It’s a desktop app that integrates several sources of incoming information, runs them all through a set of filters that you administer and then notifies you automatically when important events have occurred. That notification will come in a variety of ways, depending on how important the event is relative to your prioritized filters.

What does that mean? It means you can set Touchstone to pull in RSS and atom feeds, POP emails and Gmail, filter the incoming items for keywords you’ve set to varying priority levels with sliders and tell the system how you’d like to be notified of events of different levels of importance.

Saad tells me it’s a little more complicated than just keywords, the filters also incorporate each item’s declared importance, the popularity of the item on the net and the item’s age. Sounds smart, though the proof will be in the pudding of long term use.

If you chose to have it do so, the desktop app can also scan the contents of your computer and recommend keywords based on your past work. They call that Intuitive Attention Management. That data is all saved locally never sent away from your computer.

Notification of new events comes in three forms: system tray alerts (toast), a news-ticker style bar and a cursor trail that floats behind your cursor for a few seconds when something you’ve predetermined is really important occurs.

Imagine seeing a cursor trail whenever an especially important email just came into your inbox, an important new task is assigned to you in Basecamp or your topic of interest is being debated on the front page of Digg. Cursor trail…what’s up?

It’s just feeds and email for now, but the company is holding a contest for developers to create new input and output adapters for the system, Saad says 50 developers have signed up so far. Here’s a number of ideas to inspire future functionality.

Business model? When it goes public you’ll be able to use this awesome service for free with some particularly contextual ads around it or pay to get an ad-free version.

This is the kind of tool that I can imagine becoming core to my workflow once there’s a Mac version. If this little dream called Touchstone comes true, it’s going between NetNewsWire and Adium on my desktop. It’s a tool for smart, personalized and persistent awareness of the information ecosystem.

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Landga Tyagi: The Bastard We All Know But Can't Describe

Personally I think Langda Tyagi is the most inspired performance since Paresh Rawal’s Sardar. In between I can’t think of any actor getting in the soul of a character like this. Langda is a bit of Jack Sparrow and Bill the Butcher at the same time, which means quality. The best thing was, for the entire movie Saif killed himself to become Langda. When he called SMS “assum kar dena” in Car with Omi that sealed it for him.

The general wisdom in Bollywood is to be yourself. People appreciate certain mannerism and as an actor you incorporate that in your role. No one dares to become the character. Bachchan and SRK are exceptional at this. They will always be themselves in that character. It would be that character becomes them than otherwise, if you know
what I mean.

Saif has broken that, to be honest even Aamir Khan falls in trap for this at many times. In between Cyrus, Shekhar and Ishwar Tyagi there are too many colors on display, instead of various shades of blue.

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Omkara: Saif, Bharadwaj Brings Excellence to India

Traditionally in Bollywood you narrate fantasy and try to make it an art form, thankfully it doesn’t work. Real life is harsh, as a nation we are in the first phase of seeing reality taking art form on screen. It used to happen before but sadly those movies used to get buried under the tag of “art movie”. I think as a culture we tend to have a strong disdain for reality and we love flirting with surrealism of lowest standards.

Omkara would be a cult classic, like Maqbool, its for peoplewho like to see smart cinema, yes cinema as in international cinema and not fillums. I don’t think Othello is a subject that will go down well with “junta” they like singing, dancing, crying. Omkara has singing, dancing and crying, but it is similar to things in our lives. We don’tlike it, we like entertainment through escapism, surrealism and at times sadomaschoism. Thats Us, Indias, we are like this. It’s not good, it’s not bad. After weeks Omkara may not become a succesful product, Omkara would be a succesful Cinema.

The movie is a stand out from a technical point of view, you can count the flaws on two fingers which is exceptional for Bollywood.The creative team has achieved a new high, so congratulations to them.The movie fits well in the location, it has an authentic feel and associates nicely witht he play.The rustic and rough feel of the movie nicely captures the ambience, never for a moment things get too comfortable and I guess if you’re surrounded by political mafias there can never be a real sense of ease about any thing.

I think acting from Ajay Devgan was a bit disappointing. I am not critising him maybe I was expecting too much, but sadly for me, he couldn’t deliver anything new. You could always see shades of his character from Yuva and Apaharan. I kept wondering isn’t Omi the same guy? I mean same stare, same approach, even the same way looks into the eyes of his lover. Strange. But overall I think in context of the story he has done a wonderful job. He’s been solid and that does it for the movie so you cant be critical of him. Kareena Kapoor has been made to look really good, thanks to director. It’s good to see she is improving. Konkona Sen, she is a beautiful actor a geunine talent. Sadly she was a bit wasted in a limited screen time but had emphatic presence. Vivek Oberoi, sadly he lost out. He did his usual boy-next-door-charm but you never felt for his character. He looked more idiotic than brave and loyal, not for a moment you could sympathize with him while he was being victimised. Vishal hid him very well in the script. Naseer Sab was good. He is too big now for such roles and he managed to give credibility to this character.

The soul of the movie is Saif Ali Khan. I think since DilChahta Hai he’s shown that he is one Indian actor who is ready to imply world standards to his approach and methods. His work ethics have been fantastic. I respect him for that. Personally I think Langda Tyagi is the most inspired performance since Paresh Rawal’s Sardar. In between I can’t think of any actor getting in the soul of a character like this. He did in this movie what Pankaj Kapoor did in Maqbool with Abba Ji, which is to re-invent how a character is portrayed, it can only be achieved by legends. Langda is a bit of Jack Sparrow and Bill the Butcher at the same time, which means quality. The best thing was, for the entire movie Saif killed himself to become Langda. When he called SMS “assum kar dena” in Car with Omi that sealed it for him.

It wasn’t an easy task following Maqbool. Vishal has done an absolutely incredible job in stretching his high standards. He is a certified genius now, a rare breed, a original of the species. His stroy telling, dialogues, the whole presentation was flawless. I am sure those who are not familiar with Othello will have a different view. But I don’t see how could have Othello be re-worked better as a movie. It’s a tragedy so the end was glum and depressing. I am impressed and awed by Vishal Bharadwaj’s work. He stuck to his beliefs and made a movie that he wanted to make never bothering about crowd, money or critics. It rarely happens in Bollywood. Kumar Mangat should also be thanked for encouraging him and giving him his space. Right now Vishal Bharadwaj is the best, much better than Pretentious Leela Bhansali. Take a bow for giving a Classic of International Standards. Blogged with Flock

Useful Additions to Google Talk

It looks like Google is listening to its users and adding features that are highly demanded. With the new Google Talk it is possible to transfer files, send a voicemail, or even share what music you are listening to! The first two are pretty important and
useful but they must have thrown in the “show what your listening to” feature as a fun thing.

The file transfer will let you send files and folders to any of your Google Talk buddies. They have no size or file type restrictions so you are pretty much free to do what you want. One interesting thing that I was wondering is whether people would be able to send a virus then? The help page says “It isn’t possible to transfer actual viruses within a chat window, or through a call, but please beware of any links that are sent to you” but I don’t know if that has been updated since they added the new features. I think that answer was intended for the Google Talk version that didn’t have file transfer capabilities. Maybe I will have to give it a try later.

The cool thing with the voicemail is that you can send it to people who don’t even have Google Talk. You can talk for up to 10 minutes and it will deliver the voicemail to that person’s email address. If you try calling someone in Google Talk the voicemail service will also pickup after the 4th ring or you can send it without calling by right-clicking on the contact and selecting “Send Voicemail”.

Now it would really be cool if they figured out a way to add some of these features into the GMail Chat. There are a lot of people that I know who don’t download Google Talk and just stay logged into their GMail account constantly. It is probably much harder to do things like voicemail on there because they need to make sure it works flawlessly
across all platforms and *most* browsers.

Don’t count on this being the end of new features because I am sure Google will continue to listen to feedback and improve their instant messenger. You can find out more about the new features by visiting the What’s New page and don’t forget to download the new version!

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Windows Live Messenger The Kiddie Business

I don’t have any issues against any product trying to lure in any demographic. However take a look over at the official WLM Blog. These guys seem to be losing the plot day in night out. They talk about Greetings, Celebrations, Birthdays, Display Pic. One developer even registers the coolness of WLM. I am pretty sure if I show these teens that MSN team is chasing Adium, there would be nothing left for them.

Microsoft seriously needs to put some credible developers at helm. The Live transformation has been chaotic to say the least,  lots of functionalities, even the basic ones like showing Display Pic is buggy. Try putting a file in your buddy’s shared folder and you will know what I mean. I think focuss these days at Redmond is to make the best bloatware out there. It’s a shame.

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Some Common Sense in Indian Govt

The Indian Govt. has rightly rejected Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child program Among the objections are concerns about the effect of extensive laptop use on children’s health. Better uses for the monies, which would be required to roll out the OLPC project, are also named. Most insightful however is the observation that not one industrial country has so far implemented a similar program for its children, which casts doubt as to what the pedagogical use for notebooks in class really is.

Needless to mention this would leave no room for cuts in the deal. India is still struggling to make up for the Mid Day Meal scheme launched in the mid 90’s. It’s very pleasing to see people in Govt focusses in bettering of infrastructure first than going for fancy tools which would have helped noone. What would a child do with a Laptop without being able to use it in context of the course/ curriculum.

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DM 2 Lets You Take Control of Your Windows

DM2 is a brilliant application for Windows that improves the user interface with a lot of useful features:

* virtual desktops (if you have too many open documents, you deserve a fresh new desktop)
* minimize any window to system tray
* minimize a window to a floating icon on your desktop (not to the taskbar or systray)
* make any window “always on top”
* hide a window completely
* change the opacity of a window
* change the priority of the process that created the window
* add favorite locations to open / save dialogs

For example, you can right-click on the maximize button in the right-top corner of the window to transform a window into a floating icon. The icon occupies little space and it’s always available. If you right-click on the floating icon, you can preview the window and
restore it. Similarly, if you right-click on the close button, the window disappears completely. You can restore it from the Windows Manager section of DM2.

The application doesn’t have an installer, so you can extract the files into a folder or copy them to your USB drive. Another impressive thing: the ZIP archive has only 135
KB. DM2 is open-source and it’s free for noncommercial use.

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Hide Spam Counter in Gmail

If you receive a lot of spam in Gmail, you may not like to see the
growing number of spam messages. It’s easy to hide the spam counter -
just create a new filter with the following details:

Has the words: is:spam

Check Delete it.
Check Also apply filter to * conversations below.

All the spam messages will be moved to trash, where you can check for false positives.

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I Love To Chat

If you’re reading this I am sure you too. Often, there are days when I find myself communicating more through chat then speaking to people on the phone or in person. This gives a way lot on importance to chat client. From my unscientific survey I have deduced that people usually don’t care about client, they mostly want to see what other person is stating or communicating. Needless to say we mostly use MSN/ Windows Live Messenger ( WLM) for chatting.

I find WLM like a Light Commercial Vehicle, it’s rugged, gets the job done, has stiff interiors. Though this vehicle helps me achieve my objective but it doesn’t make my driving experience more pleasurable. So I did a bit of research and discovered that world of chatting is filled with Luxury cars, that have air-con, cushion seating, and a music player. Wow! Would you wanna drive that car? I do.

The idea of any chat client is to reliably and securely enable users to exchange text. The focuses will always be on the text. This is the biggest weakness of WLM, the focuss area by default is too cluttered. (See Below for a typical MSN Chat Screen)

If both parties are using similar color fonts, it’s nearly impossible to read without the radius of retina exploding. Apple Software developers have led the way in User Interface (UI ) design for some time now. They have found a way in adding remarkable clarity to the chat window, they’ve achieved this by putting the text in rectangular boxes that not only double up as eye candy but yields an excellent UI invention. If you put the text in a box the eye has to focuss less on creating its virtual boundry. (See Below clarity in text)

So if you like to have smartness added to you chat I strongly recommend Pandion. Although it’s not the most usable client yet, for that you should opt for Adium if you have a Mac OS X. I mean In future I am going to provocate Mac. I have used it once and after a week I became an addict, it’s the best computer in all areas. Currently I am saving to own a Mac.

One last thing, once you have got Pandion and if you want to use it, it’s best that you register with Jabber. Which is like a free network which enables you to chat to anyone irrrespective of service they are on. It’s like email of chat. However, you have excuse that no one you know uses such things, well I do and let me know if in anyway I can help you. All said and done, once you give it a try then what I have written will make more sense.

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Hello and Welcome

Hi Everyone, Thanks for dropping by

So I am ready to roll out my blog. I am looking forward to sharing my ideas, views and reviews with everyone. I feel in this day and age it’s getting more and more important that data and information remain in the interest of everyone and it should not be manipulated by Organizations or Government. No I don’t have a propaganda but only agenda to express myself.

So why a Blog? Well, its cheap and its free . I used to have a blog over at Blogspot, but felt I can do better with WordPress, actually I can. So this is not being about cool and fancy pants, even if it is, I don’t mind Some encouragement from friends is a major factor too.

I hope to keep you entertained in future, should you take some time to come over I’d ensure that you go away feeling that the light can be a bit brighter, Or otherwise.

Thank You